by Elliot Swan 

Search Engine Optimization, commonly referred to as SEO, is quite important when it comes to marketing a site. There are millions of searches each day, and most webmasters want these searches to lead visitors (or even better yet, customers) to their site. But how to let people find your site though search engines? Well, in order to effectively optimize for search engines one should probably first know at least a little about the search engines themselves--including what they look for when ranking sites in their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

First off, let’s see how different search engines compare to each other in how much they are used. After all, we don’t want to waste our (quite valuable) time with a search engine that’s hardly used, and we don’t want to skip a big one, either (after all, it would be a shame to not give as many users as possible the pleasure of visiting your site and possibly buying your products).

The Statistics

Search Engine Watch (http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/3099931) posted some percentages as to a possible estimate of how much each engine was used in May of 2005.

Not surprisingly, Google definitely took the top with 38.3%. Yahoo took their share of 18.4%, and MSN grabbed 15.6%. Which ones come after that? You can check the link out for yourself to see, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that these are definitely the top three we need to be worried about.

So now I know what you’re thinking: “Do they differ much in how they rank pages?”

Yep.

I know what you’re thinking now, too. “Then how do they differ?”

Let’s start with MSN and work our way up to #1 (Google).

MSN

Though MSN is the relatively new kid on the block, there are a couple things we can know about it. It loves to see good markup and in-text keywords. In other words, it pays close attention to things like <title> and <h> tags, and also pays attention to what you actually say in your content. Backlinks are also taken into account—i.e. who’s linking to you, and what descriptive text they used in their links. It doesn’t, however, use your meta descriptions.

Yahoo

Yahoo, like MSN, loves good markup such as <title> and <h> tags, and pays attention to on-site keywords. Unlike MSN, however, they will use your meta descriptions.

{mosgoogle}
Google

We’ve now arrived at the big G, holding approximately 38.3% of searches. What should we know about this one?

Well, Google has two major concerns: Titles and backlinks. We mentioned backlinks back when we were talking about MSN, but what exactly are they?

Backlinks

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlinks) says the following about them:

Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web log. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website.

Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the factors for determining that website's search engine ranking. For example, Google's PageRank algorithm uses backlinks to help determine a site's rank. To see a site's PageRank, you need to use the Google Toolbar for Microsoft's Internet Explorer, view the bar graph indicating a website's PageRank in Google's website directory, or download the PageRank plugin for Mozilla Firefox.

You can determine the approximate number of backlinks a website has when doing a search at Google by adding "link:" before the website's URL….

Well that last paragraph isn’t true, Google doesn’t like to show all your backlinks anymore, but if you use the same procedure on MSN, you can get a pretty good count.

The rest of that definition will serve us pretty well, though, if we know what PageRank is. So going back to Google, let’s see what they say about it on their technology page (http://www.google.com/technology/):
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

This means then, that the more important pages that link to you, and the more relevant these important pages are to your site, the higher you will be for searches looking for your content. The keywords in the links going to you help Google find out what type of content you have as well. MSN also incorporates this approach, but MSN relies more on your on-site content and keywords than Google does.

So What Good Does This Do Me?

Many people who claim to be SEO experts take this information and use it to exploit the search engines, to trick the engines into giving their sites high rankings. An example of this would be to stuff keywords on a page for search engines to find then hide all this text from normal, human users. THIS TYPE OF CONDUCT IS CONCIDERED UNETHICAL AND CAN GET YOU IN TROUBLE WITH THE SEARCH ENGINES. Google is very well known for catching cheaters.

What knowing all this information will allow us to do as webmasters will be to more accurately show search engines what our page is about and as a result become higher on relevant SERPS. In future articles, we will explore some of the ways to do this.

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