3.3 Search Engine Page Ranking Algorithms

A search engine's main job is to provide results which most satisfy a user's query. If they present a result that the user visits and doesn't agree that the document is about their query, there is a very good chance that the user may not use that search engine again. Most search engines pay no attention at all to the Meta description tags. Meta description and keyword tags are hidden attributes that you can add to the front of your document which are supposed to annotate and describe the document. Since the users will never see this information, they will be disappointed if you stick in invalid keywords or fail to keep the description in line with the document's contents which usually is the case.

Most Search Engine page ranking algorithms rank pages based on the following aspects:

• Content of the website
• Representation of content, keywords, and links on websites
• Location and number of inward and outward links on websites
• Relevancy of search terms as compared to the websites
• Given below is a brief description of the page ranking algorithms of some of the most popular search engines.

Google

You can submit your site to Google using http://www.google.com/addurl.html. Submitting your site will only make Google aware that your page exists; it is quite possible that your pages may get crawled even if you have not submitted. It is advisable to submit the home page and some inside pages. Inside pages are added to the submission, just in case the home page is found too slow to load or crawl. The pages that are submitted should link to the rest of the pages. Google indexes the full text that is visible on any page that it crawls. It generally does not index the meta tags - keywords or descriptions.

When Google lists your page in the search results, the description that is displayed is the extract of text that is around the first line where the search word appears on the page. It may thus be a good idea to write a good description of the page and build it around the most likely search term(s) and place that near the top of your page. You should remember that one sure way of getting your site listed and indexed is if there are several links that point to your site and such links appear on web pages that in turn have several other links pointing to them. The term ‘link popularity’ is used for this. It analyzes links of the pages that it has visited and this ‘link analysis’ helps to determine the ranking of the page.

Google uses a proprietary PageRank algorithm for determining relevance and ranking of pages in the search results. Location and frequency of the search term on your web page are no doubt factors in ranking; however off the page factors such as link analysis are more important. Generally, Google provides search results based on relevancy, meaning that it returns a list of pages ranked by the number of other web pages linking to each page, as well as other mathematical algorithms.

Yahoo!

Yahoo offers a human powered directory and visitors are offered the results from this directory. The directory is supplemented by web page index created by crawling. Yahoo currently uses Google for its crawler indexing. The directory is an important channel in the area of search engine marketing. It is popular and is used extensively by people to locate sources of information. Moreover the directory is a valuable boost to your site for crawling and ranking in other search engines, as the directory provides a high quality link to your web site.

When a visitor is looking for information or relevant sites, he/she could either browse through the hierarchy of directories and sub directories or search for an appropriate directory through a search interface. As your site can be listed in just one category, generally, the choice of category is an important step. Choose the top category that your target visitor who is making a search may select out of the different categories offered to him/her.

Select your target keywords and find out which categories relate to those keywords. For submission of non-commercial sites also the Yahoo Express submission is recommended rather than the Standard submission option.