“It's easy to make a buck. It's a lot tougher to make a difference.” ~ Tom Brokaw ~

How they rank your site

Before attempting to optimise your site, it is important to have a simple understanding of the different types of search engines and their functionsWe know that search engine users enter a keyword or key-phrase in the search box of a search engine (such as Google) or a directory (like Yahoo) in the hope of quickly finding websites relating to the product, service or subject of interest. It is therefore important that the results displayed are accurate and relevant.

Algorithms
The software behind today’s crawler-based search engines is programmed with extremely complex algorithms that examine the characteristics of webpages and their relationships with other pages, to decide what sites should be ranked for higher display. The same search on different search engines normally produces different results. This is because the search engine algorithms themselves are different, and take different factors into consideration while also weighting the importance on different scales. These algorithms are constantly being refined and improved to bring web users more accurate and relevant results.

Relevance is the key
In conjunction with today's search engine's complex algorithms, keywords will determine which website and which page in that website is relevant to the exact search term used in the user's search query. These keywords and key-phrases are the text words on your webpages that need to match these exact search terms when the algorithm runs. Generally, the more of these keywords it finds on a webpage, the more chance it has of being deemed relevant, but beware – these algorithms are very smart and don’t like to be tricked.

Abuse and trickery
Search Engine Optimisation must be handled with care, as search engines such as Google actually penalise website rankings for abusing Search Engine Optimisation. Your site can also be removed from their search results. Stuffing (described later) and hiding lists of keywords on webpages is called keyword spamming and is the most common trick. This technique used to work years ago, but not today. There are many other tricks employed but the algorithms are now very smart and rightly prefer to reward sites presenting genuine, ‘relevant’ content. By publishing good solid webpages and following the search engines' guidelines, you will be on the path to success.

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