CMass eConsulting

"Billions and billions" of websites.

There are a lot of websites out there.  Like stars on a cloudless night, there are so many.  So many you may have flashbacks to Walter Cronkite narrating your trip through Spaceship Earth.  The truth is, there are too many to really know anything about most of them. 

So what do search engines do?  They use robots!  Robots that manually call up every website on the Internet and “read” it.  These “web spiders,” as they’re called, pick out items to categorize and classify websites in order to allow search engines to give you the results you want.  I google “Spaceship Earth,” and Google finds all the websites and images out there that fit that set of keywords.  The question we’re going to answer here is, “What are the basic items that search engines use to categorize your website?”

There are a lot of ways to answer that question.  First, let’s ask an even simpler question: “Why does a search engine care what results it returns to users?”  Of course the answer is elementary.  Search engines want to give you the best results so that you’ll come back and search with them again.  If you don’t come back, they can’t sell ads, and they quickly go out of business.

That’s what makes Google so special in the world of search engines.  Google has for a long time been regarded as the “best” search engine because they typically return the best results. 

So what are the “best” results?  Results that provide the user with a link to the page they were looking for, whether they knew it existed beforehand or not.  So, in other words, Google and other search engines want to determine how “useful” your page will be to their users, and for which searches.

So what makes a site “useful?”

1. Text that matches the search query.  So if someone searches for “yellow labrador puppies,” and you are a lab breeder, you might think about having those words on your site so that the search engine can pick it up.
2. Page headings that match the search query.  The title of every page on your site should represent what it actually is.  Many website providers and systems do not automatically do this for you.
3. Relevant metadata.  Meta tags are the information “underneath” your site that search engines read as part of the effort to classify your page.  They’re not used so much in the mainstream anymore (i.e. Google and Yahoo), but the “description” meta tag is still used to describe your site in search engine results.
4. Recency.  In other words, newer pages are better.  The example I always give my clients is this: if you’re searching for information because you just got diagnosed with cancer, which article are you going to read, the one dated 2004, or the one dated 2009?
5. Age of the page.  This may seem to be at odds with the previous item, but it’s not.  If your site is established and has a history of more clickthroughs, it will be served up more often in the future, especially if it has been updated frequently and/or recently.
6. Back links.  In other words, how many other sites link back to your site?  Because creating a link takes effort on the part of the website creator, it is assumed that if someone else links to your site, it’s because they found it useful.
7. Total clickthroughs.  This one is self-evident.  Search engines don’t care about fairness.  If your site is the most frequently clicked based on the search terms entered, it will be the first one displayed the next time someone enters them.

So how does one break through?  Be aggressive about the things you can control.  You can’t control the number of times your site gets clicked on directly – Google will catch on to that.  But you can offer your site up as many times and in as many places as possible.  You can create other pages that link back to your site (Facebook, MySpace, etc.).  You can update your page frequently, and make sure that all your page titles are appropriate.  You can spend on a pay-per-click advertising campaign to help improve your ranking on searches you’re not currently optimized for.

You can do all of these things on your own, if you have the time and the technical ability.  But a smart Internet marketer can not only help you check off all the items on the list, but help you make sure that you’re doing it all right.