What Search Engines are Looking for and What That Means to You

"If you want to rank well in the search engine listings, you need to provide relevant, valuable and updated content, ensure that your keywords are relevant and focus on building solid incoming links to your site."

About Search Engines: It's about Relevancy, Content and Link Reputation

Like planes, trains and automobiles, we have come to rely on Web search engines to take us where we need to go. If you think about it, we’ve all used search engines in lieu of other modes of transportation to bring the shop down the street or a destination on the other side of the world

directly to us. Search engines have become so much a part of our daily lives, that we tend to take them for granted.

Why Should You Care?

With over four billion estimated web pages indexed, search engines have become a force to recon with. How would we find anything on the Web without them?

Search engines are the most widely used vehicles for finding information and generating website traffic.

According to the Computer Industry Almanac, the 2005 Worldwide Internet Population is 945 million! Their projection for 2006 is 1.10 billion Internet users.
The PEW Internet and American Life Project reports that about 63% of American adults use the Internet. That translates into approximately 128 million people. Over 78% of those 128 million people go online to research a product or service before purchasing.
According to Georgia Institute of Technology , Internet search engines currently account for over 85% of all new visitors to a website.
The PEW Internet and American Life Project reports that 84% of American adult Internet users use a search engine to find information.

If you're not tapping into the online market, you are losing customers! If you want to generate online leads or sales, your website needs to rank well in the search engine listings.

It’s About Relevancy

Keeping track of billions of web pages is no small task, yet today’s search engines continue to index more and more web pages and strive to provide the most relevant search results. Relevancy matters—it’s the name of the game! That’s why we use search engines; we want to be able to quickly and easily find exactly what we’re looking for. If a web page is not relevant to what we’re looking for at the time, we don’t want to see it in our search results. If you type “chocolate cookie recipes” into a search engine, we expect to get a listing of web pages that include recipes for chocolate chip cookies; not sugar cookies, brownies or rum cake.

If we follow a link from our search engine results that is not relevant to our search, we get upset. We’ve wasted our time! Most people will only spend between 3 to 10 seconds scanning a web page for relevant content before moving onto another site. We’re in a hurry—give us what we’re looking for or we will leave.

Gone are the days when webmasters intentionally stuffed their pages with irrelevant, yet popular, keywords as a means of attracting visitors to their sites. The search engines have gotten much smarter and so have their users. If you’re using those tactics today, the only thing you are accomplishing is angering your visitors. So, if you want your web pages ranked well in the search engines, the most significant thing you can do is to ensure that your keywords are relevant to your site’s content.

Content is King

Search engines love website content; the more relevant, valuable, updated content, the better! Your visitors want content as well, after all they are looking for information. The most successful websites, whatever their subject matter and however radical or plain their site design, all subscribe to one golden rule:"Content is king."

It's a phrase that has become something of a mantra within the industry, but there are still plenty of sites that manage to ignore it. Many companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a Web presence with lots of bells and whistles, but contain no substantial content. If your website does not provide valuable relevant content, your visitors will leave without returning.

Search engines tend to favor text-oriented sites that are easy for their crawlers to scan. Today's webmasters need to find a happy medium between what is appealing to the search engines and what is appealing to their visitors. A sure way to do this is to focus on providing relevant, valuable, updated content; the more, the better.

Reputation Matters

Your website’s link reputation has become a major factor in search engine rankings. Link reputation is the relationship links have to your website and, specifically, the context of these links. What another link says about your site can increase or decrease the chances of your online success, especially if you’re focusing on highly competitive keywords. Consequently, the best link reputation receives the highest rankings resulting in more traffic to your website.

Various search engines evaluate link reputation differently by putting varying weight on the following factors.

inbound and outbound link relationships
directory listings
page rank
whether a page is considered an authoritative page for the theme
whether pages are affiliated with one another (based on IP address or domain name)

If link popularity is how many web pages talk about you, then link reputation is how well those same web pages talk about you; ‘quality vs. quantity.’ These are two very different concepts. Link popularity relies on the number of links pointing to your website; while link reputation concentrates on the context of a particular link from a website. Several search engines use link reputation as a way for one page to “vote” for another, so to speak. The more important the page is determined to be, the higher the search engine ranking.

Search Engines Rule

Search engines have become an indispensable component of our daily lives—they are the most widely used vehicles for finding information and generating website traffic. If you want to generate online leads or sales, your website needs to rank well in the search engines. If you want to rank well in the search engine listings, you need to provide relevant, valuable and updated content, ensure that your keywords are relevant to your content and focus on building your website’s link reputation.

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