How Do Search Engines Rank Your Website?

How do search engines determine which sites should show up on the first few pages? Say you go to Google in hopes of finding an attorney who practices trademark law in Pennsylvania. If you were to try a generic query like “Attorney,” you’d get about 30.7 million pages that include the term. Of course, most aren’t relevant or helpful to your specific need, so you might try again with “Pennsylvania Attorney” or “Trademark Attorney” or “Philadelphia Trademark Attorney” until you found a site that meets your needs.

Returning the most relevant results based on a few keywords is one of the fundamental problems search engines must overcome. It’s very difficult to know exactly what a searcher is thinking when she types in specific keywords.

To give an example from the offline world, this is the equivalent of walking up to a librarian and saying “Trademark Law.” The librarian wouldn’t know what, specifically, you were looking for, so she’d start to ask you questions to narrow down your inquiry. Are you looking for federal or state trademark law? Are you looking to register your own trademark? Search through existing trademarks? Find out what can be protected as a trademark? Determine if you have appropriate grounds for sending a cease and desist? And so on.

With a generic, one word query, the search engine doesn’t understand what you’re looking for, so it returns a large quantity of results. When you use several keywords in a search, the search engine can exclude results that it determines probably aren’t what you are looking for and will return a smaller number of more relevant sites.

How does this happen? Search engines use algorithms – mathematical formulas – to determine how they rank a page. Those algorithms take into consideration things like:

• Location and frequency of keywords on a web page – If the search keyword appears near the top of the page, such as in the page title or first paragraph of text, search engines assume it is relevant to the page. How frequent the keyword appears in the content is also important.
• Number of inbound links – Search engines also use external factors to determine a page’s relevance. One major consideration is how many pages link to your website. The search engine can then analyze what your page is about and whether other similar sites believe it to be important.
• Click-throughs in search results – Search engines can also measure click-throughs, so if a site shows up in search results, but no one ever clicks on it, it will eventually drop the site’s rank.

Because search engines live and die by their algorithms, they keep these mathematical formulas top secret and are constantly updating them to ensure the best results appear in the top spots. No one – other than a few key programmers at Google – knows exactly which factors are included in algorithms and how heavily each are weighted.

Search marketers use what has worked for them in the past, what others are reporting to work, and what techniques are discussed at prominent search engine conferences throughout the year to improve a site’s rank.

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