On Internet Business

How a website can please a search engine

Posted by Michael under Paid Search, Search

Understanding what a search engine needs to put your business at the top of the search table is vital if you want to have any kind of online business. We’ve talked about the way Google Caffeine might change the way businesses look at their SEO tactics, but the basics remain the same.

Here’s a quick rundown of what the major search engines do, bearing in mind that the developers don’t just hand out details of the algorithms that decide the search rankings.  If they did, SEO experts would be able to use them to design websites that matched the algorithm perfectly!

Google

Leaving aside the alterations that Google Caffeine will bring to the SEO business, the standard Google-courting system will still apply.

Google is the Emperor of SEO and there are a lot of SEO practitioners who base their service package entirely on getting a site higher up the Google rankings. And it is simple to state the basic Google need – content, content and more content. Pages that appeal to the Google algorithm have three main attributes in terms of content: they are easy to find, they are coherent (clearly written and logical) and they have high information content.

Google also responds positively incoming links from other relevant websites. It treats each link as a ‘vote in favour’ of the relevance of your site, and that pushes your page up the results ranking.

Technically, it’s vital that your site is easy to navigate – Google is the search engine that is most like a person, it responds to clear linking. This means that you need to have at least one static link that points to every page of your site to satisfy the Google algorithm as well as the actual visitor.

Bing

Is not new, despite the vast amount of advertising that seems to suggest it is. It’s a revamp and rename of Microsoft’s old Live Search – it’s been much more heavily promoted in the USA than in the UK, especially through hotmail and the MSN pages. A couple of interesting features are that Bing ‘makes sense’ of its search results by organising them into helpful categories, rather like the Clusty search engine so beloved of journalists (but perhaps not loved by many others as it’s not become a credible rival to the big three) because it allows them to exclude searches that don’t meet their needs when tracking down leads in a hurry. Bing also broadens a user search by offering related search terms that – it says – will increase the likelihood of a searcher finding what they are looking for.

To please Bing, you can use the same algorithm tactics as for Google i.e. relevant and popular content provision, but it does seem that Bing is predisposed to give a higher rank to websites that have the search word in the URL – so, as an example, websites that have ‘cruise’ in their URL rank about some others that are more content rich but are simply cruise company name URLs

Yahoo!

SEO used to take account of Yahoo! But now that its search engine is going to be powered by Bing, there’s no differentiation in tactics for these two engines.

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