What Approaches Does Google Employ To Decide The Relevance And Search Engine Placement Of A Organisation’s Web Site?

Search engines have played a vital part in the success of the internet, as if they did not exist it would be virtually impossible to view the web site you were interested in. This is why for any business with a web site it has become a vital Online Marketing tool. With millions of websites on the internet and thousands of websites relevant to virtually every search, how does a search engine such as Google calculate the relevance of a web site and its Search Engine Placement on the results page?

First let’s focus on how people use Google; people enter in words that they see as being vital to the description of what they are looking for, these words soon became known as keywords. These keywords form the basis of how Google determines the relevance of a web site and its Search Engine Placement.

Google adopts a very complex algorithm to calculate the relevance and Search Engine Placement of websites, and only Google knows in detail how it works. Although over time a Search Engine Optimization Company or two have attempted to find out which factors make a difference to the Search Engine Placement of a web site. You could ask why a Search Engine Optimization Company would spend their time researching this. Well, businesses will pay a lot of money to get their web site on the first page of Google, as it can be an essential part of any clever Online Marketing proposal. The factors that search engine optimisation businesses have found will be discussed in this article.

Google first looks at the amount of times a keyword features on a webpage and then goes into more detail to calculate the Search Engine Placement of a web site, by assigning a weighting factor, to where the keywords appear on the webpage. The best weighting is awarded if the keyword features in the web address of the web site, next highest is the file name of the web page and then the title of the web page.

Google then looks at details that are within the HTML code that is usually not seen by a viewer of a web site, this is known as the “header” of the code. This includes a list of words that the web designer thinks are the most useful keywords on the web page. Although this has little to do with calculating the Search Engine Placement, it does make the search engine’s job easier, and helps to calculate the relevance of the web page. Also, within the “header” is a little description of the web page contents, and if a keyword appears in this it is awarded the next best weighting. Next, Google looks at the text included within the webpage. The next best weighting is awarded to keywords placed in the H1 Header, then the H2 header. Next on the weighting scale, are keywords that are written in bold text, and they are often adopted to highlight important information. The next lowest weighting is given for keywords featured in the normal text on the web page. Google then goes back into the code and looks at the file names of photographs and “alt” text that has been inputted about them. If keywords are contained within them the lowest weighting is awarded to them. This is how the majority of search engines calculate Search Engine Placement, but Google goes a a bit further and identifies how many links point to a web page.

Google obtains this information to calculate the Search Engine Placement of a webpage based on the number of times a keyword appears, where it appears and also factors in how many links are pointing to the webpage. Basically, the more links and keywords in places of great weighting, the greater the Search Engine Placement.

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