All major search engines
today use a ranking algorithm, which consists essentially of two parts:
First by analyzing site content (text
analysis, on-page factors).
Second Analysis of linkage (graph analysis, off-page
factors).
In the past, until the
time when Google began to dominate the search market, on-page ranking factors were
crucial for the search engines. Google
was the first search engine, where links to a page, made a more extensive
collation of results. All search engines
today use a combination of both methods.
Off-page factors
It is no longer possible
to get into a modern search engine like Google or Yahoo for a competitive term
on the first results page, without a really good link to the page. A "good link" means two things:
1. Clickable link text that links to your page
using a keyword or key term that your site uses.
2. The relevancy coupled with the popularity of
the website linking to you is important.
If your webpage talks about shoes, then a link from a popular shoe
fair/festival website will be classified as a “good” link.
On-page factors
The contents of a web
page, including all the author influenced aspects such as the URL, still
provide the foundation of the search process.
However, the information from the Off-page factors usually have a
greater influence on the sorting of web results. Within the on-page factors are the contents
of the title tag. This is the most
important role. Words that appear in the
title of a page will be rated highly by all the search engines. In addition, the contents of the HTML headers
like h1 or h2 are also as important as other factors such as meta tags, alt
attributes, etc.
Link text
When you create a link
that either goes from another site to yours, or from your site’s page to
another site’s page, then you must write in the keywords relevant to that
page. Don’t just have “click here”. The link text is important for getting your
page indexed and for ranking it higher.
Below is an image of a simple but effective example of linking from one
of your pages, to another, using keywords.
In the example you can see the links to the category pages on the top of
the website. These links should be
available on all of your web pages.
These help people navigate as well as give a “weak” but still useful
ranking link to your other pages. Those
are there primarily to make the website easier to use. The sitemap links are all full of the
keywords relevant to the pages they are pointing to.
The best example is the
third one down. It points to articles
about “Reviews”, “DVDs” and “Games”. It
is short but comfortably fits all three keywords into the link. Describing the pages first and then having
“click here” underneath would not help a search engine index the links or rank
the pages it point to.
PageRank
The number of links from
external sites into a single page of the considered site, which is relevant to
included words, is a factor. This value
is simply a measure of the quality of this page (from a program’s viewpoint, it
may still be crappy content). Not only
the number of incoming links is considered, but also their quality, and it is
therefore a recursive calculation.
Google calls this value
PageRank and make it publicly visible on the Google Toolbar. The maximum PageRank is ten and a few pages
such as www.google.com or www.apple.com have achieved this.
Now, the higher a search
engine assesses the quality of a site due to its links is more valuable than
the rated side-to-find content. In other
words, the higher the PageRank of a page, the more trust Google shows its
on-page factors.
