A few words before we get started…
Google, Yahoo and MSN - Search Engines which rule the world!
“Search engines keep evolving every day. What used to work a few years ago has been made obsolete today, and for the better. ”
A brief history of Search Engines
The Future Belongs to The Geeks. Nobody Else Wants It!
The term surfing: As the internet became more and more mainstream, people headed to the net for entertainment and perhaps some information. At that time there were a hand-full of search engines which allowed you to “surf” the web. The term surfing came about as relevant information was very hard to come by. The user had to “surf”, often through hundreds of pages, before landing on the topic of interest. This is because “search engines” of the time, such as Webcrawler, Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, and AltaVista were based on a very simple concept – “KEYWORD DENSITY”.
Keyword density - the number of times a word appears on the page compared to the total number of words on the page.
This is how a search engine sees your content.
Let’s simply explain the concept. Let’s quickly look at how webcrawler.com operated at the time. WebCrawler’s robots and spiders would go from page to page, following links on each of the pages while scanning the words on the page and indexing the density of the words found. The more times a word appeared on the page, the higher the web page ranked for that search term in the search results. This simply means that all a webmaster had to do was beat the number of times a search term appeared on the website, wait for the spider to come around and index the page, and his/her web page would come up on top of the search results shortly after for that search term.
Human nature got the better of this system. There had to be a better way than creating pages and pages of useless content.
Google’s concept focused on something completely different – incoming and outgoing links. Google ranked the web page, not the website. Google started ranking by the number of incoming and outgoing links it had. The more links pointed to the website, the more important the website became. This was the way it was in 1999.
Fast forward to today. People got tired of “Surfing the net”. Relevance become by far the most important component of any web page. As the algorithms became more and more complex, so did the people mastering the web. More and more people started using Google because of the quality of the search results it produced. Google had to incorporate relevance, links, page rank and quite a few other factors when considering any webpage displayed in their search results. Today, Google’s algorithm is so sophisticated that search engine optimization is a science of its own.
A search engine optimization package offer from InMarket Systems!
Over the following few weeks, I will try and give you an insight into how Google sees your web page. I will give you a few ideas on what you can do to improve your web-presence, and perhaps answer a few of the questions your web-developer never knew how to answer.
Today, Google rules this world. And remember, Google does not care about you and/or your webpage, Google is all about the end user experience!
Sincerely,
Nick Dinic
ps: Please don’t forget to comment!