How search engines’ brains work

March 9th 2007

How the search engines work is sometimes portrayed as a black art – it isn’t.  But neither is it a subject that can be done justice in a 10 minute presentation.  So what are search engines all about?

Just consider the vast amount of information a search engine like Google has to deal with.  Your own site may well have 500 pages or more.  Multiply that by the number of sites already indexed, plus all the new sites and new content on existing ones, and you see just how big the task of sorting all that data out really is.  It soon becomes clear that simply putting a keyword in the metatag and mentioning it a few times on the site is not going to do the trick.  If it were that easy, all your competitors would be doing it too – and you can’t all be no 1.

So how does Google decide who to rank and where? The answer is that all it collects all the data on your page, plus lots from off the page as well such as who links to you and even who links to the sites that to link to you.  Of course Google can’t read like a human does, it has to use artificial intelligence models to work all this out, which comes down to statistics and patterns of words used together.  So the engine puts all the data it has collected through an algorithm designed to simulate how a human visitor understands what is written on the page.  And to a large extent it works, which is huge credit to the geeks and boffins who write the algo’s. 

All very interesting you may say, but how does knowing all that help to get good rankings.  Well, if you understand how Google works, at least in principle, then you are half way to working with Google to ensure that it is your site that Google matches with search queries relevant to your products and services.  Then it is simply a matter of developing your site so that it serves the needs of your human visitors and the search engines, which takes time and effort but is well worth the investment.  There aren’t many advertising mediums where you can keep reaping the reward of your efforts, month after month, year after year.

So beware anyone offering a quick fix in the field of natural rankings, it either won’t work or if it does, it probably includes using one or other of the various techniques that are effectively cheating the engines.  If that is the case then the chances are that sooner or later, it will be picked up.  When that happens you risk your site being penalised or even banned, which is not good news!

Atracks Ltd presents intensive two day search engine marketing workshops at the Basepoint Business Park.   Introductory courses and in house training also available.

http://www.atracks.co.uk
Tel 01425 476547
email: sally@atracks.co.uk