How do search engines decide who to put in their "Top 10?"
Search Engines have the awesome task of sorting through billions of websites and returning just the ones that are relevant to your specific search. It's an almost incomprehensible undertaking. That's why search engine companies like Google and Yahoo have a huge number of Ph.Ds and other geniuses on staff. Some of the smartest minds in the world are working for search engine companies.
The mathematical formulas used by search engines are super nerdy. If you enjoy that kind of thing, here's some fun reading. For the rest of us normal people, here's the scoop. Search engines look at two main areas when deciding how to rank your site. First, they read your site to determine what it's about. Second, they determine your site's "popularity" by the number of other sites linking to yours. We'll look at each of these in more detail.
Computers Can Read?
Computers actually can read, at least for their purposes. Search engines have rooms full of computers that "crawl" the internet reading the words on your site. Crawling is the process of following links around the internet, reading the information on each page as it goes. They're looking for keywords and key phrases. These are often repeated words on your site that tell the search engine what topics your site is about. For instance, if you have a photography site, you would expect to find a lot of references to cameras and photographs. Both the repetition of these words and the location of these words on the page help the search engine figure out what your site is about.
Based on what these computers "learn" about your site, the search engine will then consider your site when someone searches for one of your site's topics. "Great!," you say. You're on your way to being found in the search engines. Unfortunately, there may be millions of other sites also about your topic (there are over 500,000,000 sites about photography, according to Google). So, how does the search engine decide which site to show as the #1 most relevant site about photography? Or #10, or #50? The simple answer is by counting links.
How many "votes" does your site have?
When another site puts a link to your website, it's like saying "I think your site is relevant." In a way, it's casting a vote for your site's importance. Google pioneered the idea of calculating the quantity and quality of links coming to your site in order to rank your site's popularity. All of the major search engines soon followed. The more votes you get, the more popular your site is perceived, as shown in the diagram below.
Not all links are equal.
Of course, not all incoming links carry the same weight. Links from more popular sites are better than those from less popular sites. Links from sites with related content to your site are better than from those with unrelated content. Links that display one of your keywords or key phrases (intead of just your website address) are also helpful.
If you know you have more sites linking to you than our website ranking tool lists, there's a reason for it. Major search engines probably know about all of your incoming links. However, they don't list all of them for a few reasons. First, competition. The search engine industry is highly competitive. They don't want to show all of the data they use to rank you. Second, some links aren't as relevant to the search engine as others. Links that come from totally unrelated or questionable sites, links that share a page with hundreds of other links, or links that are obviously a result of "link exchanges" are not as valuable. They're not all worthless, just less valuable than one-way links from trusted, related sites.
So, how do you guarantee that your links are relevant to the search engines? Get as many links from real sites (vs. bogus link farms, "Free For All" directories, doorway pages, mirror sites, etc.) as you can get. A side benefit, in addition to increasing your search engine ranking, is that links on real sites may actually be clicked on by real customers. What a novel idea.
So, what can I do?
There are a lot of things you can do today to help your search engine ranking. First of all, write a lot of content for your site. Search engines (correctly) believe that most web searchers are seeking information. The more information you can provide about your site, or business, or hobby, or whatever, the more your site will be attractive to search engines. Don't worry about optimizing your content to include a certain number of references to your keywords. Just write in your natural language. The more unique and valuable information you can write on your site, the better.
Whatever you do, don't SPAM. Spamming is the process of trying to trick search engines into thinking your site is more about a topic than it is. This is often done by repeating lists of keywords, or hiding keywords on the site. Spammers also duplicate content or even copy content from other's sites in order to add to their "relevant" content. Trust us, the search engines are wise to these tricks, and getting wiser. Your best bet is to write a lot of unique content in your own voice. Your effort will be rewarded.
Become popular!
The most important thing you can do for your search engine ranking is boost your site's popularity on the web. We obviously think that a LinkFamilyTM is the best way to do this, and it's not just because we're biased. There are a lot of time-consuming or costly methods as well as some bad ideas to look out for. LinkFamiliesTM help you get a huge amount of quality incoming links without the huge effort or cost.
Link exchanges used to to be a popular method for obtaining links, but as we point out link exchanges don't work like they used to. Industry-specific Link Networks can be an effective, but often costly, method. They can also be hard to find for your industry. That's why you should start your own! A LinkFamilyTM network is the perfect way to create an industry-specific link network.
The goal is to have a high number of trusted, one-way links to your site. You can get this by paying thousands of dollars each month to other sites, spending the next two years soliciting links from everyone you know and meet, or you can simply create your own LinkFamilyTM network.