How Search Engines Rank Pages - Page 2

There are many more examples of relevancy indicators a spider considers when visiting your page, such as the proximity of your important words to the beginning of the page. Here, as well, the spider does not necessarily see the same things a human visitor would see. For instance, you place a left-hand menu pane on your web page. People visiting your site will generally not pay their first attention to this, focusing instead on the main section; however, the spider will read your menu before passing to the main content – simply because it is closer to the beginning of the code.

Remember — during the first visit, the spider does not know yet which words your page relates to! Keep in mind this simple truth. By reading your HTML code, the spider (which is just a computer program) must be able guess the exact words that make up the theme of your site.

Then, the spider will compress your page and create the index associated with it. To keep things simple, you can think of this index as an enumeration of all words found on your page, with several important parameters associated with each word: their proximity, frequency, etc.

Certainly, no one really knows what the real indices look like, but the principles are as they have been outlined here. The words that are high in the list according to the main criteria will be considered your keywords by the spider. In reality, the parameters are quite numerous and include off-the-page factors as well, because the spider is able to detect the words every other page out there uses when linking to your page, and thus calculate your relevance to those terms also.

When a Web surfer queries the search engine, it pulls out all pages in its database that contain the user's query. And here the ranking begins: each page has a number of "on-the-page" indicators associated with it, as well as certain page-independent indicators (like the Page Rank). A combination of these indicators determines how well the page ranks.

It's important to keep this in mind: after you have made your page attractive to visitors, ask yourself whether you have also made it readable for the search engine spiders.

Article Author: Raul Vergara

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