As the biggest source of web traffic, search engines are incredibly important to organisations. The very first step most people take when looking for information, products or services is to carry out a search online. Therefore, in order to successfully market products or services online, it is essential that internet users who are not aware of your site can find you easily. This can only happen if your website has been optimised for the search engines.
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Traffic from search engines is incredibly valuable – probably the most important source. Users who carry out a search are typically looking for something very specific and are usually highly motivated to buy, as long as they find what they need. Ensuring you have a strong presence within the search engine is really important.
What determines a website’s search ranking
Factors Influencing Rankings
All search engines try to rank websites by their relevance when users enter a search term. In order to do this, they need an index of pages to refer to. An index is created by what are called spiders or bots, which trawl the web for pages, storing a copy of the text as they go. When a term is entered into a search engine, each page with the word or phrase on it is identified.
When it comes to the way these pages are ordered, things become rather complicated. Search engines use variations to determine relevance, such as how frequently a word or term appears on a web page. A page where the term or phrase appears several times is usually considered more relevant than a page where the term is mentioned just once. However, over-use of the term can also have a negative effect and may be picked up as spam by highly sophisticated filters.
In addition to key terms, Google and other search engines also determine the relevance of a page by looking at other web pages which link to it. Those with related content will score more highly than those with unrelated content. Even these links will vary in terms of relevance, however. The age of the web domain will also have an effect upon the way it is ordered in the search engines. The older the site, the more trusted it becomes.
Turning ranking factors into results
How Can I Optimise My Website for Search Engines?
Google is the top search engine, with approximately 80 per cent of the search market. As such, being at or near the top (and definitely on the first page) of a Google search should be the ultimate online marketing goal. But getting there is easier said than done. That is why many companies outsource their SEO to companies such as Gloucester seo agency digi-tel, which offers Gloucester SEO and Web design services and internationally.
There are at least 100 different considerations used by Google when ranking pages, including the hosting country, the location of the server and the location of the user entering the search. Together, these factors will determine a site’s rank – on page 1 or page 1001. While each search engine uses slightly different criteria and methods of ranking, Google is nearly always a good indication of where your website is going to feature on others such as Yahoo.
Practical SEO habits that still work
A high ranking only pays off if people click. A listing that sits near the top but says nothing useful will be skipped, so each page needs a clear title tag and a meta description that tells the searcher exactly what they will find.
Keyword research matters more than volume of content. The terms a tarmac contractor wants to be found for are very different from those a builder in the same town needs, so start from the words your own customers type rather than broad industry phrases.
Old shortcuts now do harm. Stuffing a page with the same phrase, or publishing thin articles purely to collect backlinks, is against search engine guidelines and can pull a site down. Links are worth having when they come from relevant, well-regarded sites that choose to point to genuinely useful content.
Why local search matters for small businesses
Search optimisation is not only for large companies. For a small business, the most valuable searches are often local ones, such as someone looking for a cake maker or a plumber in their own town, because that person is already close by and ready to buy.
Showing up for those searches brings more of the right visitors to the site, people who live within reach and can actually use the service. That makes local search a more efficient use of a modest budget than broad advertising aimed at everyone.
It also helps a small firm hold its own against bigger competitors. A national brand may outspend you on adverts, but a well-optimised local business can still appear in front of nearby customers at the moment they are searching.
Mobile-friendly sites and search rankings
Most people now search and read on their phones, and a look at almost any site’s analytics shows a growing share of visits coming from mobile devices. A site that only works properly on a desktop is letting down a large part of its audience.
Google now indexes the mobile version of a site first, so how a page performs on a phone feeds directly into where it ranks. A site that is awkward to use on a small screen will struggle to rank well, however good its content.
In practice that means images that resize to fit the screen, menus and buttons that are easy to tap, and every feature still working on a phone. It is worth checking the site on several screen sizes rather than assuming one test covers them all.
How hosting affects search performance
It is easy to focus on content and keywords and forget that the web host underneath can hold a site back. Speed is the clearest example. A slow server makes every page slow, however well it is designed, and speed affects both rankings and how long visitors stay. Compressing images and removing unnecessary scripts helps, but if the server itself is slow, a better hosting plan may be needed.
Downtime is another risk. If a site is frequently unavailable when search engines try to crawl it, pages can drop in the results, and a long outage can see them removed altogether. Errors such as a failed database connection usually mean the server can’t cope with the traffic, which is often a sign that the site has outgrown cheap shared hosting. It also helps to choose a host with servers close to your main audience, and to check that it offers reliable backups and security certificates as standard.
Helping search engines crawl your site
Search has come a long way from the earliest tools, which did little more than list file names on servers. Today, automated programs called crawlers follow links from page to page, reading content and adding it to the search engine’s index. When someone searches, the engine pulls matching pages from that index and orders them into a results page. If a crawler cannot reach a page, it cannot appear in the results, however good it is.
That is why the structure of a site matters. Clear navigation and sensible internal links help crawlers find every important page, and an up-to-date sitemap points them to content they might otherwise miss. Broken links waste crawl time and frustrate visitors, so check for them regularly. Pages that load quickly, work well on mobile and use clean, valid code are easier to process. Many of the same tools that crawl the web can also be pointed at your own site to spot these problems early.
Summary
This article explains why search engines are the main source of website traffic and how they rank pages. It covers how spiders index web pages, how keyword frequency, backlinks and domain age affect relevance, and notes that Google holds around 80 per cent of the search market. It suggests that businesses often outsource optimisation to specialist SEO agencies, given over 100 ranking factors.
Questions this article raises
- How many of the 100+ ranking factors matter most for a small local business?
- How does a site’s domain age actually get factored into Google’s rankings?
- How do rankings on Google typically compare with rankings on Bing or Yahoo for the same site?
