In the early days of the Internet, it was mainly used by government, military, and technical types to keep in contact with each other. It didn’t have a real commercial use; it was fairly functional.
Then, as time changed and “regular people” started going onto the internet, it became a tool to communicate and be informed, then it transformed into a place be entertained and to buy things.
Search engines were developed to help people find things. That way, people didn’t have to know the exact URL they wanted to visit before they went online. They could go to a search engine which operated as a central hub and type in their search request. The search engine would find sites related to that search and return them.
To find sites, search engines would send out “robots” or “spiders” which are little programs that crawl through a website and learn everything they can from your content and from the code (which is the part that no one can see but it makes your site function). Then they would report back to the search engine what they’ve discovered on your site and the search engine would then sort you based on what the robots learned. (It sounds very science fiction but it is really quite simple).
When you type into the search line the topic that you’re looking for, the search engine goes through its files and looks for websites related to that topic (as identified by the spiders) and lists them for you. In many cases, search engines list 10 URLs per page and typically those ten become the most clicked URL of all the ones in the search. (People will rarely click past the first 3 or 4 pages of a search if they haven’t yet found what they are looking for; they’ll just go and try a different word to search with). And, the higher on the list you are, the more often you’re clicked. (The 9th URL is clicked more often than the 10th. The 8th is clicked more often than the 9th. The 7th is clicked more often than the 8th, etc.) The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place URLs returned in a search are click many, many more times compared to the ones further down the list.
So, as you can imagine, people sought feverishly to discover how to get onto the first page of a search and (more importantly) how to get in the top 3 spots. To do this, they learned what they could about what spiders and robots looked for and how search engines evaluated websites. When they learned this, they tweaked their websites to be more favorable. This is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Essentially, it’s the activity of making adjustments in your website to appear higher on search engines.
And it is big business. If you were to Google “SEO” you would find many people claiming to have found the secret to Search Engine Optimization, promising higher clicks to people who buy their programs. The reality is that each search engine uses a variety of things to determine how it ranks websites.
Individually, each factor used by the search engines may not mean much, but when put together in a calculation (an “algorithm”) the search engines wield a lot of power over where they think your website falls in the big scheme of things.
So what are the factors? Most of the search engines keep their algorithm a secret now.
Not too long ago, it was common knowledge about what made a website popular on the Internet. It was a combination of such things as meta tags (which are lines of code) and keywords on your website.
But unethical website owners, desperate to get ranked higher, took advantage of the algorithm’s factors and would do things like “keyword stuffing” to get ranked higher. Keyword stuffing is when they would fill their pages with keywords. It was incoherent to people. Sometimes, in order to appear more legitimate to the people who would be shopping at their site, they would change the font color of their keyword lists to match the background of their website, thus making them invisible. There are many unethical methods to accomplish this but there are many ethical methods as well. Search engines work hard to uncover the unethical methods and then build their search programs in a way to avoid ranking those unethical methods.
Keep Moving Forward!
-Dave
List Building Secrets Revealed
