Let's talk about the basics of a search engine and how it brings up results. SERPs (search engine results pages) are the pages that are returned when a query is performed. Each search engine is slightly different in how it presents these results but the logic remains the same. The following are the popular sections you will probably see. Let's talk about them.
*Vertical navigation - SERPs are listed in separate verticals such as images, news, video, or maps; most popular format *Horizontal navigation - same as vertical just presented in horizontal format *Search query box - where the user will enter their query; search engine may also provide "hints" or "suggestions" as to what it thinks you might be looking for in order to produce more accurate results. *Results information - provides a small amount of meta-information such as number of pages that are relevant to that particular query. *PPC (aka paid advertising) - ads placed by companies in order for their products/services to be shown at the top *Natural/organic/algorithmic results - relevance ranked results based on query. *Query refinement suggestions - lets users search with a more specific and relevant query for increased satisfaction *Navigation to more advertising - Only via Yahoo; additional paid search results related to original query Additionally the search engines may also display more than just SERPs. They may provide the information so that the user may not even need to click on any of the SERP links. For example, if you the user is inquiring about the weather in Dallas, Google will display the current weather information as part of top vertical navigation information. Other examples, include popular artists, restaurants, videos, etc. In order to provide top relevant SERPs, search engines must be able to crawl and index a massive amount of data. In the crawling process, robots called crawlers or spiders search engines start with a seed set of sites that are known to be very high in quality, and then visit each of the links on each page of those sites to discover other web pages. The speed at which they process relevant information is staggering to say the least. After the information is collected by crawlers, it is then indexed and prioritized using IR (information retrieval) and document analysis according to importance and citation analysis. Algorithms rank the information according to the content quality and reading level of the content on each page. This process is referred to as algorithmic ranking criteria. Therefore, the words you put on a web page, play an enormous role in how your page will be prioritized in the SERPs. Making sure you have the correct terms listed in the meta tags are vital for crawlers to be able to find your page and display it for users to see. Link analysis is used to analyze SERPs by researching who is linking to a site and what reviews they are giving. In addition, they can assess whom is worthy of being trusted based on the authority of sites linking to them and the contextual data about the site. Although search engines are powerful they do have their limits. Differentiating images, limited OCR, pictorial aspects contained in Flash, audio/video files, and reading any content contained within a program all continue to pose difficulty at this point in time. Disambiguation is also a challenging factor. For example, if a user types in jaguar, the search must try to determine which type of jaguar the user is wanting. Is the user requesting information about the animal jaguar or the vehicle jaguar? Despite all of the challenges search engines face, they still manage to produce accurate SERPs the majority of the time. Just as there are positive ranking factors (as we mentioned earlier) there are negative ranking factors. Some of those include: malware being hosted on the site, cloaking, pages with sale links, content that advertises paid links, and slow page speed. One way to create better SERPs is to correct search operators. -Keyword excludes the keyword from the search results. For example, science -computer shows results for all types of science except computer science. "Key Phrase" shows search results for the exact phrase. For example, "dachshund puppy" will display results specifically on dachshund puppies rather puppies or dachshunds. More advanced search operators include intitle:" ", filetype: " ", and contains: " ", etc. Each search engine has their own search operators so it's best to find one you like and get familiar with those search operators.
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AuthorHello! My name is Becky Gage and I'm starting a new blog called Becky's Bytes. The goal is of this blog is to take you along the process of what I'm learning about in the book "The Art of SEO, Mastering Search Engine Optimization" by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, and Jessie C. Sricchiola. Archives
November 2022
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