October, 2005

Search engine will sort through the millions of pages it knows about and return ones that match your topic. The matches will even be ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Of course, the search engines don't always get it right. Non-relevant pages make it through, and sometimes it may take a little more digging to find what you are looking for. But, by and large, search engines do an amazing job.

Techniques in designing and developing you site can improve how you appear in these search engines.

Each engine has a ranking mechanism, which changes from time to time, but the following criteria generally determine the ranking for all search engines:

1. Location and frequency of keywords on a web page  note that almost engines ignore "spamming" of keywords, for example, repeating the same words 100 times.

2. Links to your pages  engines will look at how many "quality" sites link to your sites and how many clicks these links get.  Some even track how many clicks you get in the search results themselves

3. Paying Money for Placement  engines like Google and Yahoo let you pay them to override criteria to improve ranking or purchase ads in the results.  This is NOT the same as many BOGUS offers that you will find from various third party companies.  There are many SCAMS in the SEO market.  Buyer Beware!

4. Hidden tags and tags surrounding keywords  using metatags and placing header tags can influence engines, and even the name of the page, or use of keywords in the title of the page can have a strong influence.

5. Images are ignored  maybe one day engines will be able to read words embedded in images, but that day has not come yet.  One of the most common mistakes is to have important text as part of a graphic image with no "ALT" tag. 

6. Ranking improvement takes time the day has gone when you could trick engines into placing you higher in results.  Search Engines have gotten very sophisticated.  Unless you want to pay lots of money, you must be patient and diligent.