The simple answer is that no one (other than the search engine companies themselves) really knows how websites are positioned. Over the dozen or so years that the search engines have been commonly used to find information online, the attempts of organisations to read, interpret and to understand the nature of the engine algorithms to achieve high search engine ranking has evolved into a multi-billion dollar Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) industry.
Forrester Research estimates worldwide e-commerce now exceeds $7 trillion, with 85% of Internet users making use of search engines to locate products or services. Optimising websites for prominent search engine placement has become a fundamental component of any online business plan, with between a quarter and half of online store visitors and most of their new customers coming from search engines. Media sites are discovering that many people are bypassing their home pages - where ad rates are typically highest - and using search engines to go straight to the specific pages they want.
All search engines apply highly complex and top secret algorithmic formulas by which they assess queries and match them to (hopefully) the most relevant returns. These formulas are the search companies currency, their core business differential and the means by which they claim their competitive advantage over each other. This dictates their success as organisations through the ability of the codes to deliver what users want - relevance. Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, allowing those results to be false would turn users to find other search sources. And that's bad for business.
Search engines ability to decrease the number of times it leaves searchers disappointed is crucial to fending off attacks from competitors, maintaining user loyalty and preserving the advertising goldmine that searches represent.
Early versions of the search engine algorithms relied on webmasters providing page data such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provided an overview on each page's content. Solely relying on meta data as the means of indexing soon proved unreliable, as often keywords in the meta tag were not truly relevant to the site's actual keywords. Inaccurate, incomplete, inconsistent and manipulated data in meta tags and other attributes within the HTML source of a page generated irrelevant searches.
Being so reliant on webmasters to provide the meta data upon which search relevance was determined made the search engines vulnerable to abuse and manipulation of the system. Irrelevant search returns, though of short-term benefit to unscrupulous web site owners, undermined the search companies credibility, business models and potential profitability. In a dog-eat-dog business environment where only the fittest survive, it was essential that the search engines devised methods of achieving better value, more relevant results. To provide superior search returns the engines have had to constantly evolve, ensuring that their results pages show the most relevant search results rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. Over time the search engines have evolved increasingly complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional on and off-page factors that are more difficult for webmasters to interpret and manipulate.
That most of the traffic on the Internet today is driven by the search engines with 90% of web users generating hundreds of millions of queries a day bears testament to the success of the search engines systems maintaining their integrity. Those that failed to deliver relevant results have fallen by the wayside.
That said, as well as delivering tight search results millions of times a day, users click away from search engines disappointed that they couldn't find the information they were looking for. Search engines often find what users want, but not always. This explains why the search engines are constantly adjusting their 'ranking algorithms' - the formulas that decide which web pages best answer each user's question.
It's difficult to gauge exactly how advanced the search engines techniques are, as so much of what they do is veiled in secrecy. However, there is a common consensus amongst SEO professionals that Google continues to outpace its competitors.
Yahoo! is now developing special search formulas for specific areas of knowledge such as health. Microsoft has bet on using a mathematical technique to rank pages known as 'neural networks', that try to mimic the way the human brain learns information.
Google's use of signals and classifiers, by contrast, is more rooted in current academic literature, with signals and classifiers calculating several key measures of a page's relevance, including one it calls 'topicality'. Increasingly, Google is using signals that come from its history of what individual users have searched for in the past, in order to offer results that reflect each person's interests.
However, the fundamental value created by all the search companies is the ranking. The question therefore, for any organisation with an online presence that they wish to develop and exploit, is how to best achieve strong ranking.
At SEO Consult we apply our experience and expertise in crafting SEO campaigns to deliver real business returns. We understand the search environment and bring into play our extensive and intimate knowledge of search engines and industry-leading optimisation techniques.
We clearly understand that relevant content strategically organized in a way that fundamentally supports information retrieval such as topical hot spots and contextual themes has strong internal links with persuasive and compelling content and usability and is the primary objective of professionally applied SEO. At SEO Consult we have the technicians, copywriters, developers and know-how to deploy the appropriate strategies to deliver measurable results.
As search engines evolve, so do we and whereas SEO once revolved around meta tags and keywords so usability, quality content development based on semantic themes, high class information architecture all play a critical role in developing the all important 'PageRank'. Starting from deep within client sites we build valuable content, using tangible naming conventions. We cross-link your pages and craft a page with purpose and search engine relevance. Authority bestowed upon sites through inbound links from other authoritative sites plays an increasingly important role in PageRank. We develop and apply powerful link-building strategies to our SEO projects in response to this trend.
No comments:
Post a Comment