Search engines rank websites and individual webpages based on several factors. Here’s a simplified explanation of how they do it:
- Visibility: First, the search engine needs to be able to see the website or webpage. This involves crawling the web and following links from one webpage to another. If a webpage is blocked from being crawled or if it’s hidden behind login forms, it won’t be seen by the search engine.
- Indexing: Once the search engine sees a webpage, it stores and organizes the content in its index. The index is a large database of all the content the search engine has discovered and deems good enough to serve to searchers.
- Relevance: When a user performs a search, the search engine looks at its index to find the most relevant content. This involves considering the type of query, the user’s location and time, and the relevance of the webpage to the query. The higher a website or webpage is ranked, the more relevant the search engine believes that site or page is to the query.
- Algorithm Adjustments: Search engines constantly adjust their algorithms to improve the quality of search results. These adjustments can affect the ranking of websites and webpages. For example, Google makes algorithm adjustments every day to tackle issues like link spam.
- User Experience: Search engines also consider the user experience when ranking websites and webpages. This includes factors like whether the webpage loads quickly, whether the content is easy to read, and whether the website provides a good user experience.
- Backlinks: Backlinks are links from other websites to your website or webpage. Having a lot of high-quality backlinks can improve your ranking. However, having too many low-quality backlinks can harm your ranking.
- Localized Search: If the search is for local businesses or products, search engines like Google use three main factors to determine ranking: relevance, distance, and the completeness of the business listing.
Remember, the goal of search engine ranking is to provide useful answers to searchers’ questions in the most helpful formats. Therefore, optimizing your website or webpage to be easily crawled, indexed, and understood by search engines can help improve your ranking.