Google
recently released an official
explanation of how they rank results
in their newsletter for librarians.
In this document, Google engineer
Matt Cutts explains how
Google decides what result goes
at the top of the list.
Here are the most important
facts from the document:
1. Getting indexed by Google
does not mean that you are
in the index
Many webmasters still think
that a visit of Googlebot means
that they should now be in Google's
index. That's not the case,
after indexing a web page, Google
has to do many things with the
indexed pages before they can
be found in the results:
"Our first step is
to crawl and index the billions
of pages of the World Wide
Web. [...] Our crawl has
produces an enormous set
of documents, but these
documents aren't searchable
yet. Without an index, if
you wanted to find a term
like civil war, our servers
would have to read the complete
text of every document every
time you searched."
2. The keywords on your
web pages are important
Some people claim that links
are the only factor that will
get you high rankings on Google.
Google explains the importance
of keywords on web pages in
the document:
"So the next step
is to build an index. [...]
we juggle our data in order
to list every document that
contains a certain word.
For example, the word 'civil'
might occur in documents
3, 8, 22, 56, 68, and 92,
while the word 'war' might
occur in documents 2, 8,
15, 22, 68, and 77. [...]
Suppose someone comes
to Google and types in civil
war. In order to present
and score the results, we
need to do two things:
1. Find the set of pages
that contain the user's
query somewhere
2. Rank the matching pages in order of relevance"
If you want to be found for
a special keyword, it is important
that this keyword appears on
your web pages and that it appears in
the right places.
3. The right links from
other web pages are important
After using keywords to decide
which web pages should be displayed
in the results, Google uses
a variety of algorithms to decide
in which order these web pages
should be displayed.
"Now we have the
set of pages that contain
the user's query somewhere,
and it's time to rank them
in terms of relevance. Google
uses many factors in ranking.
Of these, the PageRank algorithm
might be the best known.
PageRank evaluates two
things: how many links there
are to a web page from other
pages, and the quality of
the linking sites. With
PageRank, five or six high-quality
links from websites such
as www.cnn.com and www.nytimes.com
would be valued much more
highly than twice as many
links from less reputable
or established sites."
It's no surprise: The number
and the quality of
incoming links influence the
ranking of your web pages on
Google. Make sure that you have
many incoming links that come
from related and reputable web
sites.
4. PageRank is not the only
important factor
In contrast to public opinion,
Google uses many more factors
besides PageRank:
"But we use many
factors besides PageRank.
For example, if a document
contains the words 'civil'
and 'war' right next to
each other, it might be
more relevant than a document
discussing the Revolutionary
War that happens to use
the word 'civil' somewhere
else on the page.
Also, if a page includes
the words 'civil war' in
its title, that's a hint
that it might be more relevant
than a document with the
title '19th Century American
Clothing.' In the same way,
if the words 'civil war'
appear several times throughout
the page, that page is more
likely to be about the civil
war than if the words only
appear once."
That's
exactly what IBP's Top 10
Optimizer does: It analyzes
the top 10 ranked pages on
Google and it tells you where
exactly on your web pages
and how often you should use
your keywords so that you
can get high high rankings
on Google.
What does this mean for
your web site?
To get high rankings on Google,
you must have optimized web
page content and many good incoming
links.
We are happy that Google has
released this document. It confirms
that our website promotion tools IBP and ARELIS are
exactly the right tools to get
high Google rankings.
The official Google document
also confirms the articles from
our previous newsletter issues
and the information of our free
search engine optimization eBook.
If you haven't downloaded this
eBook yet, you should do it
now. The eBook is a step-by-step
guide to high rankings on Google,
Yahoo, MSN and other important
search engines.
It is very easy to read and
it contains checklists so that
you can quickly check if your
web site is ready for search
engines. The ebook is part of
the IBP
download and it can be selected
in IBP's help menu.
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