How Search Engines Rank Sites

Ideally all you'd have to do to get your site highly ranked would be to tell a search engine that it exists. However, because there are so many sites to index (Google currently lists over 8 billion pages), most search engine operators use automated programs known as "spiders" or "bots" to gather the data. A search engine sends a spider to "crawl" the Internet looking for new and updated documents/pages/sites, and bring them back to its index or database. In the index, it filters documents according to the search engine's rules (such as banning unethically coded documents) and stores the documents which meet its quality criteria.

When a web user makes a search, the search engine evaluates the sites in its index and assesses which are most relevant to the requested information. This assessment is based on level of expertise as evidenced by the density of keywords in the site's content, the legibility of the site's coding, and references in the form of links from authoritative sites. Note that links of primary importance to search engines are the ones pointing to your site.

So what is SEO?

Well executed Search Engine Optimisation makes sites clear and "search engine friendly" in four ways:

1. It addresses the limitations of spiders by providing understandable site coding & architecture, as well as addressing indexing filter issues. Hidden coding which is not visible to a site user is understood by search engines; for example a search engine cannot see a picture of a Mazda 626 on the web, but if the web designer has attached a tag which says "Mazda 626" to the picture, the search engine reads and indexes it. Similarly, the page title "Home page" is quite meaningless to a search engine, but the title "Web site design, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), & Graphic design" is clear, and gets correctly indexed.
    
2. It identifies keywords most used by the target audience and adds those words to the text and coding of the web site.
    
3. It attracts inbound links from authoritative sites, and targets those links to searchers' interests.
    
4. It analyses visitor activity ("traffic") to the site to look for ways to improve the search results. This is a follow-up activity, some months after the web site has been online.

When you perform good SEO, you help the search engines do a better job of providing web users with the information they're looking for, and your site's rankings improve for the audience you are targeting.

Stuart Allt Web Design applies ethical SEO methodologies to the creation of web sites, and offers search engines what they're looking for: pages that can be easily classified by humans and spiders. The end results are sites which achieve top-level rankings at Google and other major search engines.