Website Design Ideas

Search Engine Results Page SERP?

To further understand search engines and keywords, let's analyze some search engine results.  The page that's returned from a search is the SERP, Search Engine Results Page.  Using the previous example of Texas Archeology and examining the SERP, there are 10 links to sites with variations of the term. They are listed in descending order of relevance to your search.  Relevance in this case is the number of times the search terms appear on the page.  In this case, The link to The Texas Archeological Society is the first return on the page.

Texas Archeological Society | TAS | Archeology Anthropology ...
The Texas Archeological Society promotes study, preservation and awareness of Texas archeology. The Society encourages scientific archeological exploration
www.txarch.org/ - 16k - Cached - Similar pages

The top line or link line of the search engine return is the title tag or at least part of the title tag for your web page.  Below that is part of the description from the description tag and some selected text from the page body.  The URL and page size are displayed followed by a cached image of your page.  Clicking on the cached link displays the page with the occurrences of the search terms highlighted.  In the first example on the SERP, examining the cached page shows the terms are mixed naturally in the text.

If you continue your search engine research, you'll discover some pages that have the search terms repeated many times but in a way that isn't relevant to the page text.

A number of tricks have been used to gain higher placement on the SERP.  One of which is to have text on the page that is the same color as the page background.  Invisible to the visitor but visible to the search engines.  Some people get away with this for a short while but once discovered have been removed from the search engine index to be lost in cyberspace forever.  Search engine companies are continuously updating their algorithms to detect scams like this.

Once you've selected a page for viewing, if you have the Google or Yahoo tool bar, you'll notice at the top of the page, the page rank.  The idea is that the importance of your website is based on how important others think it is.  Page rank is based on the number of sites that link to your page.  Search engine companies are constantly update their algorithms.  In this case it is to determine if the sites linking to yours are relevant links.  Links from link farms don't rank as high as links from another site similar to your own.

Once you have a website online, you'll get tons of e-mail offering to get you in thousands of search engines overnight.  You'll get offers for search engine submission tools that range from free to expensive.  The fact is that once your site is online, the most important search engines; Google, Yahoo, and MSN (Now Live Search) will start crawling your website within a few weeks to a month after you're online.  These are the search engines that generate 95%-97% of the search engine traffic on the internet.  Google even states they get the same e-mail.

It's been mentioned in another area of this website that some search engines practice aging to prevent search engine SPAMMING from fly by night websites.  Fly by night websites appear for a few days often for nefarious purposes then are gone.  About the only way around the aging process is to purchase advertising from the search engine company.

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