Understanding Page Rankings

When researching for something, most internet users with concern themselves only with the results that appear on the first page. Few would bother looking occasionally at the second and third search pages, but many would go beyond that. Thus, it is very important that operators land their sites on the first page of a search.

But of course, it isn’t as easy as you might think. In fact there are many things that one needs to go through in order to get a good ranking, not to mention to actually land on top of the first page. And that’s not the last of it, as the rankings can change very quickly, so SEO specialists need to constantly need watch out for these. And there are still many other things that can complicate this work.

In order to get a batter gain an understanding of how the search pages are created, it would be a good idea to learn how sites are ranked by the search engines in the first place. Note that the following is just a simple explanation of the whole process. However, this can still be a useful guide in better understanding how the whole thing works.

The first thing that search engines use to determine page rankings is by its relevance to the term you are searching for. For example if you type in “oven toaster”, the search engine it will look for pages related to it. But the search engines don’t actually see the exact relations between the words that you type in. Instead it determines relevance by counting how many times the words you used actually occurs in the text of the pages in the engine’s directory. The more times the words appear, the more the page is considered relevant.

However, this is not always the case. There are plenty of instances when several websites come up with the same keyword density (the term used by SEOs). In this case, search engines further categorize the sites by determining the links that go to the site. And in here, many factors are at play.

One of the more important determining factors is the amount of links that lead to the site or the particular page. The more popular a site, meaning the more links it has, the higher it gets in the search pages. Both direct and indirect links are included in the count.

However, the amount of links that a site has is not the only thing to be considered in here. The quality of the links are also closely watched by search engines. Link diversity is is an important aspect that engines use. Basically, link diversity is how varied the sources of the links are, this can be determined by studying how the link sources are themselves connected. The popularity of the link sources themselves also contribute to the quality of the links. Simply put, the more popular the link source, the more value it adds to the link and the higher it gets the page it links to on the rankings.

All of these factors are then combined and calculated by the search engine to come up with the sites final ranking in the search pages. Search engines continuously tabulate the changes in these factors in order to update their rankings. Note however, that each search engine has its own set of algorithms (mathematical formula) to determine the rankings, so this should be taken to account when getting your page ranked.