Search Engines Make A Living On Their Top Secret Algorithms.

No one knows for sure exactly how the algorithms work, not even Google employees.  This is how they keep an edge on their niche market.

Sure there is a lot of educated speculation and theory, however, it still remains a crap shoot for the most part.  Search Engine algorithms are constantly changing.  Some fundamentals remain constant and others are continually tweaked.

I am going to go over how search engines work, what they look for and how you can stay ahead of your competition.

Spiders and Bots

The Engines have what we call “Bots” or “Spiders” that crawl the world wide web, going from website to website searching and recording content.  These Bots will determine the relevancy of your site and decide how to index it.

Search Engines will find your site if it’s indexed.  Today, there are millions of sites that are not even indexed by Google or other engines, simply because they are poorly put together and have no structure.  To find out if your site is indexed, simply Google your website. i.e. (put www.yoursite.com) into the Google search bar.  If it comes up in the search, Viola!  Your Indexed.

Determining Relevancy

Search Engine Bots look for content.  It recognizes “spoken language” or “Mark-Up Language” like HTML.  It doesn’t recognize Video or Flash….Yet!  On page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) helps search engines figure out what your site is all about.

It looks at links coming into your website as well as linking within your website.  This is why you will see anchor text in links within a blog post or website that point to another source of information within your own site. This gives your site more credibility and “Juice” with the search engines.

The Spiders also look at history.  How often is your site updated? Search engines LOVE new content. How well related is your content? Is it dedicated to a specific topic? How well is it organized? What sort of links do you have coming in?  The search engines will look at the quality and quantity of links to determine your Page Rank.

What is Page Rank (PR)?

Page Rank is a system that Google has to gauge the importance or value of a website.  It will vary from 0-10.  Google, CNN, USA.Gov and a handful of other powerhouse sites have a PR of 10.  It is very rare.  Page Rank does not scale linearly.  It is more difficult to go from a PR of 2-3 than it is to go from 1-2 and so on up the scale.  Kind of like the difference between a Stage 3 Hurricane and a Stage 4. It doesn’t sound like much, but a Stage 4 Hurricane is way more violent than a 3.

What Does PR Have To Do With SEO?

Higher PR tends to rank in search engines better so a high PR site is what your looking to have over the course of time.

In conclusion, you want readable content and lots of inbound, high quality links from sites that are relevant to yours.  Not all links are equal.  You don’t want sites linking to your site that link out to every website under the son.  This dilutes the power or “juice” that the link will give you.

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