Business - Great Ideas

A Basic Understanding.

Google indexes pages on the Web by using what are commonly known as "spiders", "crawlers", or "robots".

Google's famous search engine spider, GoogleBot, uses links on web pages as a sort of freeway. It travels from site to site by following links. When Google finds a new web page, Google will "crawl" the code on the page and transport it back to its datacenter. Google's "FreshBot" may visit "indexed websites" everyday in order to keep the index fresh. How often this is done varies wildly, is often speculated, and varies from site to site.

Google's database maintain billions of pages. They use a proprietary formula (or alogorithm) to "score" the relevancy of websites for each search query. The highest ranking, or "most relevant" websites for a specific query are listed first in the search results.

Take for example the search query "Tiger Woods". Imagine Google maintains two pages in it's index containing the name "Tiger Woods" (in reality it would have hundreds of thousands).

Now imagine the first page displays the following headline, "Tiger Woods Wins Green Jacket". The second page it titled "Greg Norman wins US Open", but mentions Tiger's name (in passing) in the text of the article. Google will most likely rank the first page as "more relevant". The first page would appear above the second in the search results. Some other factors that seem to be major contributing factors in the algorithm of Google and other major search enignes include:

Keyword-rich, visible, on-page content in the form of paragraphs of complete sentences (not keyword after keyword separated by commas. This should be informative, descriptive text using words pertaining to your business.)
Keywords in the title tag
Keywords in the description tag
The number of web pages out on the Web that are linking to your site
The quality of the web pages out on the Web that are linking to your site
The number of links on a page
The keyword density of any particular section of text
Google awards "points" for how often keywords are mentioned, how prominent they are on the page and the location on the page. It is important not to overdo repetitive keywords… Google filters these sites out as "keyword spamming".

It is important to design your site with clean code. For the most part, the more text you have on your site, the better you will rank. This is because Google believes you are providing good information to you visitors. In essence, you are becoming an authority on a topic.