How do the search engines rank websites?

When someone “searches” for something on the Internet they generally use a search engine, like Google™. The internet user types in keywords pertaining to what they are looking for in the search engine; and up comes a list of websites relating to said keywords. There are 2 types of search engine listings: “Sponsored” results, and “Organic” results. The Sponsored results are paid search advertising (Search Engine Marketing) means advertisers pay to be listed in those positions .We will look further into Search Engine Marketing in Lesson 4. For now, let’s focus on the organic search results. Organic search results can be seen as the large block (1-10) of listing in the main portion of the search results page. Click the thumbnail to see full image.

As viewed in this example of “Arizona Real Estate,” we can note that there are 17 million results relating to said keywords, and the top (or #1) position is held by a local news site azcentral.com. The number 2 and 3 position are Arizona specific pages from Realtor.com. Finally the #4 position is held by the Arizona Department of Real Estate. All these sites are good results for this search, but what makes one appear above the other?

Trust, Relevancy, and Authority determine rankings

In this example, according to Google™ azcentral.com is trusted, more relevant, and has more authority on the topic of Arizona real estate than these other websites. How did they do it? Let’s look at relevancy, Authority and Trust a bit closer.

Trust

A website earns trust by being a good citizen on the Internet. A trusted website is one that:

Does not link to bad neighborhoods (adult sites, gambling, fraud scams) or anywhere that is too far off topic.
Has been around for a while (a year or more).
Has good up-time and speed (reliable and easy to get to).
Has not done anything considered “spammy”: keyword stuffing , link farming, etc.

In our Arizona Real Estate example, all 4 top positioned websites followed these guidelines.

Website Relevancy

This one is fairly straightforward. The website content must be relevant to the desired search phrase. A website like Realtor.com is relevant to all things real estate, and a portion of it is very relevant to Arizona real estate, but azcentral.com is deemed more relevant in this example. Why is that?

This is because azcentral.com is about all things Arizona, and has a very large real estate section. Google™ will usually apply more value to local/geographic relevancy factors if a location is used in the search phrase. A search for just “real estate” shows Realtor.com #1 and azcentral.com nowhere to be seen.

Link Authority

Think of authority as a popularity contest, and in this popularity contest votes are cast in the form of links. By linking to a website, you in essence say it is an authority on that topic. So a link like this: Arizona Personal Injury Lawyer is telling Google™ that I think the Solomon and Relihan website is an authority on the subject of personal injury law.

If staying with the popularity contest example, not all votes are counted as equal. The popular kids opinion seem to matter more than everyone else. So a link from an authoritative site to another site will pass more value than a link from a lesser site, especially of both sites that are in the same industry (relevant linking).

So in the Arizona real estate example, all these websites have links pointing to them, but azcentral.com probably has the most using “Arizona real estate” as the link/anchor text. Click here to see these websites ranked by number of incoming links using that link text. Notice the allinanchor: modifier being used in the search bar.

Putting it all together

For your website to be the top dog in the organic search results, your website has to prove that it can be trusted, it is more relevant to the topic and audience than the other guys, and has built up authority on the topic. This really boils down to writing solid content that is concise and on topic to the search phrases your customers are using, and promoting your website online to build incoming links. This is what search engine optimization is all about.

Why do Top rankings matter to me?

Pardon the cliche: Location location location. Your potential customer is out there right now searching for a product or service that you offer. We are not talking a few dozen prospects; we are talking thousands, even millions, even tens of millions depending on your product or service.

No one uses the phone book anymore

When was the last time you used one? If you are not on top of Google™, Yahoo™, and MSN™, your business does not exist (a stretch, but you get the idea).

Organic vs. Paid

We will cover Paid search Advertising aka pay-per-click aka Search Engine Marketing later in this series. The main difference to point out here is that there are 2 sets of results on every page. The “Sponsored” results are bought by advertisers, and the organic results are earned as we discussed above. There was a time when the internet’s public in general did not know the difference between sponsored and organic results. The public is now catching on and the general internet audience is aware that “Sponsored” ad’s are a form of paid advertising.

We will cover the pro’s and con’s of SEO vs. SEM later.

A few quick facts why location matters

Here is a general rule of thumb for the distribution of clicks on any given first page of organic results. Starting from #1 - #10: 35%, 15%, 7.5%, 5%, 2.5%, 2.5%, 2.5%, 2.5%, 5%, 10%. It’s interesting to see how being at the bottom of the page is actually better than being in the middle. Bottom line: #1 gets the gold.

Here is a general rule of thumb on the distribution of clicks from page’s 1 - 3 or results #1 - #30: 94%, 5%, 1%.
Bottom Line: #1 gets the gold.

End Lesson 1 - On to Lesson 2

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