How Do Search Engines Order Their Results?
People pay thousands of dollars to top the search engine result pages, but what really gets your website as the top suggestion?
On the face of it, search engines are quite miraculous. Not only can they often predict your next search term based on the first few letters, but they can instantly display millions of results in order of relevance. But just how do they do it?
Behind The Curtain
At the risk of ruining any sense of magic, here goes:
- Search engine results have already been collated and analyzed in readiness for many common queries.
- Huge supercomputer-powered algorithms constantly trawl the internet looking for content changes.
- They measure loading times and attempt to gauge more subjective issues like the quality of written content.
- Findings are used to compile an index of sites relevant to particular keywords, ready to be displayed.
Each search engine undertakes this process slightly differently, and the exact composition of their algorithms remains closely-guarded to prevent cheating or workarounds. Previous flaws in ranking methods led to the phenomena of link farms and keyword stuffing – deliberate attempts to defraud results engines. The algorithms themselves are also constantly evolving, which further increases the challenge of determining how they score websites.
These are among the hundreds of different factors affecting where websites appear in results pages:
Keyword Usage and Density
This is often referred to as search engine optimization, although SEO involves much more than using certain words or phrases prominently on each page. Incorporating terms people might search for is the best way to ensure a site is deemed to be relevant to a particular search query; extensive content helps, too.
Backlinks
A website with lots of external sites linking to it is seen as authoritative and knowledgeable. The link farms mentioned above were a fraudulent attempt to make sites seem more important than they were, and any association with link farms is hugely damaging. However, genuine links from legitimate sites are still valuable.
Loading Speeds
The search engines have recognized that most web traffic is conducted through mobile devices, and their algorithms estimate how long pages take to load. Quicker sites are deemed to be more mobile friendly (as opposed to the dated concept of specific mobile sites), which will improve ranking over slower rivals.
On-Page Optimization
Packages like Yoast in WordPress attempt to demystify the process of using metadata text. This appears in page headers, URLs and image captions, providing the search engine algorithms with an outline of each individual page’s contents. Again, using popular search terms is essential for a high score.
Age
There is little to distinguish a one-year old domain from a two-year old domain, whereas a site that’s been active for a decade is obviously more established and likely to be trustworthy. Established sites with frequent updates score highly, while Google’s results clearly display the last date a particular page was modified.
Top Level Domain
There are now over a thousand TLDs available – the final part of a website address, such as .com or .org. Country-specific ones will perform more highly in searches within that country, but they’ll be penalised in foreign markets. Websites seeking a global audience should therefore consider using a non-geographic TLD.