What is SEO?
How to improve your search
Ranking on Google search engine
Improving positions in the natural listings is dependent on marketers understanding the process whereby search engines compile an index by sending out spiders or robots to crawl around sites that are registered with that search engine.
The technology harnessed to create the natural listings involves these main processes:
1 Crawling. The purpose of the crawl is to identify relevant pages for indexing and assess whether they have changed. Crawling is performed by robots (bots) that are also known as spiders. These access web pages and retrieve a reference URL of the page for later analysis and indexing.
Although the terms ‘bot’ and ‘spider’ give the impression of something physical visiting a site, the bots are simply software processes running on a search engine’s server which request pages, follow the links contained on that page and create a series of page references with associated URLs. This is a recursive process, so each link followed will find additional links which then need to be crawled.
2 Indexing. An index is created to enable the search engine to rapidly find the most relevant pages containing the query typed by the searcher. Rather than searching each page for a query phrase, a search engine ‘inverts’ the index to produce a lookup table of documents containing particular words.
The index information consists of phases stored within a document and also other information characterising a page such as the document’s title, meta description, Page Rank, trust or authority, spam rating, etc.
For the keywords in the document, additional attributes will be stored such as semantic markup (<h1>, <h2> headings denoted within HTML), occurrence in link anchor text, proximity, frequency or density and position in document, etc.
The words contained in link anchor text ‘pointing’ to a page are particularly important in determining search rankings.
3 Ranking or scoring. The indexing process has produced a lookup of all the pages that contain particular words in a query, but they are not sorted in terms of relevance.
Ranking of the document to assess the most relevant set of documents to return in the SERPs occurs in real time for the search query entered. First, relevant documents will be retrieved from a runtime version of the index at a particular data centre, then a rank in the SERPs for each document will be computed based on parsing many ranking factors, of which we highlight the main ones in later sections.
4 Query request and results serving. The familiar search engine interface accepts the searcher’s query. The user’s location is assessed through their IP address and the query is then passed to a relevant data centre for processing. Ranking then occurs in real time for a particular query to return a sorted list of relevant documents and these are displayed on the search results page.
Search engine ranking factors
Google has stated that it uses more than 200 factors or signals within its search ranking algorithms.These include positive ranking factors that help boost position and negative factors or filters which are used to remove search engine spam (also known as webspam) from the index where SEO companies have used unethical approaches such as automatically creating links to mislead the Google algorithms.
The importance of ranking factors are much disputed by SEOs since with so many factors it is difficult to isolate their impact to prove a correlation, or more important a causative relationship between.
The interested should read the balanced article bdiscussing the The Myth of Google’s 200 Ranking Factors. In this coverage we will summarise the current thinking based on Dave Chaffey’s more than 15 years of experience as an SEO consultant and publisher.
At a top level, the two most important factors for good ranking positions in all the main search engines are:
● Matching between web page copy and the key phrases searched. The main factors to optimise on are ‘keyword density’, keyword formatting, keywords in anchor text and the document meta-data including page title tags. The SEO process to improve results in this area is known as on-page optimisation. We will cover some of details of best practice for this process in a topic later in this section.
● Links into the page (inbound or backlinks). Google counts each link to a page from another page or another site as a vote for this page. So pages and sites with more external links from other sites will be ranked more highly. The quality of the link is also important, so if links are from a site with a good reputation and relevant context Search engine ranking factorsGoogle has stated that it uses more than 200 factors or signals within its search ranking algorithms.
These include positive ranking factors that help boost position and negative factors or filters which are used to remove search engine spam (also known as webspam) from the index where SEO companies have used unethical approaches such as automatically creating links to mislead the Google algorithms.
The importance of ranking factors
are much disputed by SEOs since with so many factors it is difficult to isolate their impact to prove a correlation, or more important a causative relationship between. The interested should read the balanced article by discussing the The Myth of Google’s 200 Ranking Factors. In this coverage we will summarise the current thinking based on Dave Chaffey’s more than 15 years of experience as an SEO consultant and publisher.
At a top level, the two most important factors for good ranking positions in all the main search engines are:
● Matching between web page copy and the key phrases searched. The main factors to optimise on are ‘keyword density’, keyword formatting, keywords in anchor text and the document meta-data including page title tags.
The SEO process to improve results in this area is known as on-page optimisation. We will cover some of details of best practice for this process in a topic later in this section.
● Links into the page (inbound or backlinks). Google counts each link to a page from another page or another site as a vote for this page. So pages and sites with more external links from other sites will be ranked more highly. The quality of the link is also important, so if links are from a site with a good reputation and relevant context.
Phase 1
Determine relevant documents set.Rank in order of relevance Search query string User searches Query/Rank processes SERPs
Phase 2
Extract document titles and snippets. Return as SERPs Crawl control Crawlers Inverted Document and index servers link history Crawl/Index processes The WWW web pages and documents/media Inverted index servers.
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