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Webpage and search engines

  • Thread starter cchang
  • Start date
I don't believe there's any easy answer to this but I'll give it a shot in hopes that someone can help...

Exactly how do search engines work and how do they come up with the order in which display their results?

The situation is that I have a webpage and would like for it to appear on the first page of the search result.

I know companies employ people at great expense to accomplish this but is there anything I can do to improve the visibility of my webpage?

Thanks in advance

Charles
 
Is your pages entered into a search engine like Google?
Meta tags and page content usually determines page placement.

I check from time to time were my pages are listed at, and make changes to try to get higher placement. This can take a few months till pages are reindex.
 
depends on the search engine

some take money.. and the more you pay, the higher the placement of your site.

some send spiders.. these spiders tax your server.. they look for word placement, how often that word is stated in your website page. they wont pay attention to meta tags or description tag. only the content areas of your page. so if you say "flytraps" 500 times in your one page... and the next guy only has it 300 times, then you are ahead of him.

some engines only look at meta tags.. that is how you get your site listed as well, by simply putting as many keywords as you can think of that have to do with your site. that is wy when you type "teddybear" into msn you get porn sites listed as well. that is also why you get porn sites no matter what you type, cause they put nearly every word in the dictionary within their meta tags..


does this help?
there really is no way for you to control the search engines.. just to use the one that does a more thorough search and gives you less crap... google is a good one. and sometimes yahoo.. msn sucks.
 
Well that's the million-dollar question. Upon such a question were the fortunes of Google founded.
laugh.gif


Exactly what algorithm each search engine uses is not always advertised, to prevent people from exploiting the system, as it were. Google has good success in part because their link listing is in order of relevance, as nearly as that can be determined. I think they base it in part on the number of times a page is linked to by other pages. But obviously it's more complex than that, as that lends itself easily to exploitation.

Companies can get their page on the "front" by paying, but then it's listed over in the "sponsored links" column.

So the solution to your problem is: make your page so good that everyone links to it, and it will rise to the top.
 
[b said:
Quote[/b] (elgecko @ Nov. 23 2004,11:39)]Is your pages entered into a search engine like Google?
Meta tags and page content usually determines page placement.

I check from time to time were my pages are listed at, and make changes to try to get higher placement. This can take a few months till pages are reindex.
How do you enter your page into a search engine?
Do all pages reindex monthly?

As suspected... no easy answer. I'll just have to hope our web designer is really on top of his skills to produce something worth checking out.

smile_m_32.gif
 
I think the "robots" are constantly crawling the Web, reindexing and expanding the database.

One file that you may or may not find useful is the robots.txt file (google it). This will let you tell search engine robots what they should and shouldn't include in their spidering. Not perhaps what you need right now, but i've found it useful to limit the times my family website shows up, and also certain parts of the NECPS sight should be protected from undesirable searches that weren't before.

Some search engines will have a link at the bottom or elsewhere that let you submit your page. Check it out... i know that MSN does. Can't remember if Google does or not.
 
Maybe a bit more technical than what you're looknig for, but this document includes a short description of Google's PageRank algorithm (er, as of 10 years ago). http://www-db.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

An important factor in how Google ranks sites is how many links from popular sites link to yours. Another important factor is whether your keywords are in your URL or domain name name.
 
Search engines work by scanning the entire stinking internet for cerntain key words that you type in to the little box (or exact phrases, words not to find, etc). I think it presents them by order of age (newest at front).
 
That's not completely true. Ranking is much more complex than age, or websites would simply sink off the frontpage of search engines and never been seen again. This would not be very useful if you were searching for Microsoft and only found the 10 newest sites that mention Microsoft, and not Microsoft's homepage.
 
  • #10
hmmm..upon reading this thread, I checked out the position of a few of my webpages..im the #1 google hit for several search topics!
smile.gif

of course, it helps that I have webpages about REALLY obscure things! ;)
do a google search for:

mason bogie ui&e

and im the top hit!
actually, there are 5 hits total, and they are all me!
cool..
how about: lehigh valley railroad surviving locomotives
yep, im #1!
sorry..im just showing off now..
so my answer is, "have a webpage with a really obscure topic!"
but obviously that wont work for everyone.

cchang,
what is the topic of your webpage?
what would people search for to bring up your page?
and where does it rank right now?

Scot
 
  • #11
[b said:
Quote[/b] (scottychaos @ Nov. 26 2004,1:17)]hmmm..upon reading this thread, I checked out the position of a few of my webpages..im the #1 google hit for several search topics!
Try searching Google for

scottychaos

You get 987 results, probably all of which are correct!

It does indeed help to have an obscure topic or name, cchang produced 5,620 results from all over the world.
 
  • #12
[b said:
Quote[/b] (cchang @ Nov. 23 2004,1:02)]
How do you enter your page into a search engine?
Do all pages reindex monthly?

You can go to this link to enter your page into Google.
http://www.google.com/addurl.html

I'm not sure how often they reindex.

Your page can show up at different spots depending on what word(s) someone types in for the search.
Such as a have a page on Red Claw Crabs. Do a search for red claw crab and I'm number 1. If you type red clawed crab I'm 2, just crab, no idea were it places. It's somewhere after page 10.

Another exapmle is my woodworking and intasia page. Type in woodworking, I have no clue were my page is at. It's somewhere after page 10.
Use intarsia, I'm on page 9. Use intarsia and woodworking, number 1. Use woodworking and intarsia I'm at the bottom of page 1.
So it all depends on what keywords and content you use on your page and what someone types in for the search.
 
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