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How does Search Work? 5 Tips on Improving your Website’s Ranking
1 Feb 2007
Author: Graeme Klass
This article gives a basic overview of how search engines work and tips to improve your ranking.
Yahoo!’s original strategy
In the beginning, Yahoo! started as a student hobby by David Filo and Jerry Yang, who in 1994 decided to keep an online list of interesting websites. As their list grew, they decided to put those links into categories, and sub-categories, and so on. This is important as this dictated their general approach to advertising – businesses pay to be listed within a certain category. Think of early Yahoo! as the YellowPages of the Internet world. Over time they developed search algorithms to trawl their listings (and then the web at large) for interesting websites.
Google’s approach
Like Yahoo!, Google was spun out of Stanford University by two PhD students: Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. Their approach was to not to categorise websites but to rank them based on their popularity. On a basic level, website’s popularity is based on how many other websites link to them. So the more your website is linked by others the more popular you are and thus your website will be ranked higher than others.
As Google’s search engine evolved, their algorithm ranked “main stream media” websites (eg. News.com.au or cnn.com) as having higher quality content. So if your website is linked from these high quality sites, your ranking improves and you start to shoot to the top of Google’s search rankings. User’s found that Google’s method of indexing and ranking websites extremely useful in getting to relevant information on a consistent basis.
How do you get onto search engines?
There are a number of strategies to improve your website’s “popularity” ranking on search engines.
- Content is king
Many people focus on “tricks” to fool search engines. Your primary strategy is to continually improve your website content. Make your content so interesting and so compelling that other website operators and bloggers want to link to you.
- Write articles for the main stream media.
This is easier said than done. But take any opportunity to write opinion pieces or give interviews to the main stream media. Get them to provide a link to your website. The search engines will give your website a boost.
- Participate in online forums
Find online communities in your areas of interest. Participate, but don’t “spam” your message. Make sure your website or business solves a need that is being discussed in the forum or blog.
- Meta data
Make sure that you include meta data and meta tags to your website. This “meta” information helps search engines understand the content of your webpage and thus helps connect searchers to you. Ask your website operator to make sure that these are up to date and relevant to every page of your website.
- Free press releases
There are a number of free press release services out there. Do a Google search for them. It’s one way to promote your site and getting links to your site.
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