Search Engines

Google, who currently handle around 70% of all the search queries say that:

"The software behind our search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we're able to put the most relevant and reliable results first."

So Google is the most important search engine and should be given the first priority in getting your web site in front of your audience. Yahoo is the next most important and then comes Live Search and finally the rest. Optimising your site for Google will usually mean it will work well with the other engines but always bear in mind that you may need to take account of the other engines, they still amount to 30% of the search queries.


Search Engine Optimisation So how can we use this information to improve our web sites position in the search engine results, this is the process known as search engine optimisation. It is clear that, with 80% of the search engine business, Google dominates this area and any website needs to perform well in the Google rankings. Google itself publishes some very clear guidelines for webmasters and there are plenty of other resources that give their views of what is important.

For Google the importance of a web site is reflected in the PageRank™ the larger the number the more important your web site, although this in itself does not govern your place in the results of any search, very often you will find higher ranking pages are not the first in the results page. Google also analyses page content including fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word as well as the content of neighbouring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query.