site bytes

We’ve said it before – websites are more than just pretty pictures. In order for your site to be effective, major search engines like Google and Yahoo need to include you when they display results for your type of product or service.

So what exactly do Google and Yahoo want? The same thing you do when you’re looking for something on the internet. Google and Yahoo want to deliver the most relevant results to the people using their service. Serving up consistently relevant results encourages people to come back to their site because they know they’ll be able to find exactly what they want quickly.

Here’s how it works: search engines are constantly sending out automated agents, “search bots,” to crawl websites. These agents go to each page of a website to read the text – to gather the words. The search engine takes into account how many times the words are used, where they are used (high up on the page or as the last sentence) and whether the words are used as page titles, content headings, as links, or as names of images. It carries all of the information back and stores it in a giant database.

Search engines also read behind-the-scenes text – the code that users can’t see. However, because of misuse early on (webmasters entering text that had nothing to do with their product or service just to attract traffic), search engines don’t consider these items (such as keywords, descriptions) to be any more important than any other text.

Search engines also gather information on how many other websites are linking to your website – and the more “important” those websites are, the higher the priority you’ll receive when it comes time to displaying results. In other words, a link from a well-known, highly-visited website such as hp.com will give you more priority than a link from a local blog that receives only a few visitors a week.

The above, in a nutshell, is how a search engine decides what to display in its results. Each search engine uses slightly different methods (algorithms) to determine display results. Only those who work at Google or Yahoo really know the details (it is after all, the secret to their success), but knowing the above and following some simple guidelines regarding keywords and their placement can really improve your online performance.