To gain top listings in the search engines it helps if you
understand how the search engines work with your website and how they determine
which websites get to appear at the top.
Search engines uses robots (other names are spiders or crawlers)
which are programs that visit websites by following links from one page to
another. When a robot visits a page it will take a copy of that page and put it
in the search engine’s own database (this process is known as caching a page).
Once in the database the search engine will apply their algorithm to tag or
index the page so that its position in the SERPs for any given search term can
be determined quickly.
Website pages need to be indexed regularly in order to stand any
chance of performing. Each page on a website that is indexed can be produced in
the SERPs so every indexed page should be considered to be a potential landing
page. You can easily block any page that you do not want to get indexed and
concentrate efforts on optimising important landing pages.
The algorithms used by the search engines take into
consideration many different factors (Google has about 200 factors) when they
evaluate a page and decide where it should appear in their results pages. SEO
considers each page on a website and applies the best fit to get the best
ranking for that page amongst its competition. However, competition for
different phrases is not equal and so the same thing that is successful for one
page is not necessarily effective for another page.
Search engines want to
provide the best and most relevant results for their users and so our efforts
are concentrated on meeting the demands of the algorithms through white hat
methods. With Google having up to 85% of the UK search market we tend to favour
Google’s algorithm which in turn favours good quality content combined with
quality, relevant inbound links. These clean strategies also feed Yahoo’s and
MSN’s algorithms too.
For competitive market places it is harder to get top rankings
for generic product and service related search terms because other websites
have fought hard to get to the top and will defend their position against
newcomers. With the right strategy, over time, top listings can be achieved but
we would argue that the value is in the conversions achieved and conversions
can come from a much wider source than the immediately obvious generic phrases.
Approximately 80% of searches
performed every day are unique and many use 3, 4 or 5 word phrases, they are
quite specific phrases and so they tend to convert well – this is commonly
referred to as the “long tail” of search and its value should not be
underestimated.
