Search Engine Retrieval And Algorithmic Ranking Criteria for SEO

Once search engines have crawled and indexed the pages on your website, the content is added to their indices. This means that you site is now available to be displayed in the results pages for the appropriate search queries. Where in these SERPs (search engine results pages) your site will appear, will depend primarily on just two factors, relevance and ranking.

When a user visits a search engine, and types in a search query, the search engine does two things. First, it only shows the results that are relevant and related to the originating query. Secondly, the search engine attempts to rank the many results it retrieves, in the order it perceives as most useful. While none of the major search engines have published their specific algorithms, a lot of work has been put in to try and reverse engineer these with varying success.

What can be said unequivocally though, is that the perceived importance of a site plays a large part in where the site is displayed in the SERPs. This importance is taken as a combination of the trust a site has, along with the ‘authority’ of its pages.

Relevance of content is one of the first areas any SEO effort should focus on. It is, simply put, the extent to which the content in each document or web page, matches the user’s originating query. As a general rule, a document is deemed to be more relevant if the search terms or phrases occur several times and are contained in the title or headlines. Incoming links to the page with related anchor text will also contribute to the relevance score.

The importance of getting relevance right in your SEO cannot be emphasized enough. If your page is not deemed relevant, it will not appear in SERPs at all, never mind make it to the top of the first page of results.

Google’s Page Rank was one of the pioneers of the principal of using a page’s popularity to determine its importance. The principle borrows heavily from the ‘citations’ used in academic circles and in many business documents. The general idea is that the more important and trustworthy a page is, the greater the number of other pages linking to it there will be.

So, given a number of pages that all seem equally relevant, Google’s search algorithm will use this perceived importance to rank them. In real life though, things are a bit more complicated than that, since it is quite unlikely that two pages will ever have an exactly equal relevance. It will therefore be a combination of primarily these two factors, along with more of the search engines proprietary algorithms that determine the ranking.

That said, sites without relevant content, and that do not have significant (relative to the competition) backlinks are rarely going to make it to the top of the search pages. Understanding this will be key to developing an effective SEO strategy, and also in evaluating the relative strengths and weaknesses of any new or existing website.