How Search Engines Rank Websites

The number one question is why do I want to be found on the search engines when I make enough anyway? Well, search engines advertise you for free, which is quite a bit cheaper than advertising on websites that you target market might never read let alone find. Plus when people do want to find something, 95% of the time, people will use a search engine. It has been proven that consumers are almost 5 times likely to buy from your website via the search engines rather than by advertising.

Great, you got free advertisement from one of the major search engines in the world. Problem is your 542,059 out of 5,000,000 and very few people scroll past the first 30 results, and the competition on the top spots are all the leading brands. Thankfully, the search engines aren't bothered by anybody being the bestseller of X year, they are only concerned by the quality of the website, which levels out the playing field significantly.

For example, you sell widgets, you have the best website for widgets, but Widgets Ltd are outdoing you in sales. One day, the search engines rank your website number 1 for the product that you and Widget Ltd are in serious competition for, shame Widget Ltd website isn't ranked at all in the search engines. Anybody looking for those widgets will find you at the number one spot, and will not see Widget Ltd any where in the search engines, meaning that you will get all the sales.

This is the biggest plus of search engines, but not everybody's websites are search engine friendly. So the way to do this is with S.E.O (search engine optimisation) which can add all the things that is needed for you to be found under you 'keywords'. Keywords are what you want to be found for on the search engines. They can be a single word to a phrase, for example: "Widget" and "I want quality widgets" are both examples of keywords.

The way search engines find your website is by these clever little automated programs call 'spiders'. Spiders 'crawl' through your site looking at a number of factors that make it attractive towards them, the more attractive towards a keyword, the higher the placement. All spiders follow a set of rules as well to make them not to follow certain parts of your website. Why would you want to not index some pages? Well, lets say you have a forum that's for members only, spiders can usually find there way into places like these and display them on there searches, which isn't really something that you want to happen.

All search engines use there own spiders that like and dislike certain factors, the three major search engines (Google, Msn, Yahoo!) spiders are different but they all follow the spider disallow rules. Google is the dominating search engine of our time, and its 'algorithms' (the equation of the website to keywords) are the most different and people believe the most advanced for a search engine.

Will being number 1 in a search engine increase my sales? Not always, being number one on a search engine will bring you more (sometimes millions of people) traffic to your site, but the sales you make with this traffic depends on your website. If your customers have to click forever just to find the product they want, and still not able to buy it, they will go elsewhere.

Why now email or phone us now on 01524 65533 or 0845 057 3371 to see what we can do for you and your business.