How Does Google Rank Your Website?
By Anna Johnson on September 1st, 2009Google isn’t exactly transparent when it comes to how it decides where to rank your website in its search engine for a given keyword or keyphrase. But, despite its secrecy, Google has left – and continues to leave – clues.
Indeed, last year Google gave out some of its clues when explaining the three principles underlying its search engine technology. These principles related to understanding search engine users, understanding search queries, and understanding web pages.
The main aim of Google’s search engine is supposedly to list search engine results based on what information search engine users are genuinely looking for. In turn, Google’s technology aims to understand users’ intent, taking into account not just the search query but the search engine user’s location and other factors.
Google seeks to understand search queries by offering such tools as alternate spelling, synonyms, and concept analysis of the search terms. And it aims to understand webpages by working out the chief concepts conveyed by the content, as well as considering what are more or less important words on the page (e.g. via title tags, heading tags, etc) and also how recent is the page content.
You probably already knew all or most of this right? But it bears repeating because when Internet marketers find their sites de-listed or simply not ranking very well in Google it’s often because they haven’t really developed sites to ‘match site with keyword’ based on Google’s same principles.
In other words, if you want to rank highly in Google, it’s probably a good idea embrace those same principles of understanding search engine users, understanding search queries and understanding webpages: optimize your webpages based on matching your content with what people are looking for according to the keywords they use.
