Did You Know...
Search Engine Optimization
Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URI, to the various engines which would send a spider to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed. The search engine spider would download a copy of the page and store it on the search engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracted various information about the page, such as the words it contains, where these are located and any weight for specific words, as well as any and all links the page contains, which would then be placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.
More recently, Google brought a new concept to evaluating web pages, called PageRank, which has been important to the Google algorithm from the start. PageRank is an algorithm that weights a page's importance based upon the quantity and quality of incoming links. PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are more valuable than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer.
The PageRank algorithm proved very effective, and Google began to be perceived as serving the most relevant search results. On the back of strong word of mouth from programmers, Google became a popular search engine. Off-page factors such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis were considered as well as on-page factors to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines focusing primarily upon on-page factors for their rankings.
On the whole, most agree that the signals that influence a page's rankings include:
More recently, Google brought a new concept to evaluating web pages, called PageRank, which has been important to the Google algorithm from the start. PageRank is an algorithm that weights a page's importance based upon the quantity and quality of incoming links. PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are more valuable than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer.
The PageRank algorithm proved very effective, and Google began to be perceived as serving the most relevant search results. On the back of strong word of mouth from programmers, Google became a popular search engine. Off-page factors such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis were considered as well as on-page factors to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines focusing primarily upon on-page factors for their rankings.
On the whole, most agree that the signals that influence a page's rankings include:
- Keywords in the title tag.
- Keywords in links pointing to the page.
- Keywords appearing in visible text.
- Link popularity.
- PageRank of the page (for Google).
- Keywords in Heading Tag H1,H2 and H3 Tags in webpage.
- Linking from one page to inner pages.
- Placing punch line at the top of page.