Ranking of web pages by search engines

The success of commercial web hosting depends to a large extent on how search engines rank a web-hosting site. Everyone is (or should be) eager to get a higher ranking from search engines. It is through search engines that a vast majority of people find what they want on the Internet. Understanding how search engines do their job can lead to more successful web hosting

Web hosting is just a means for replicating physical commerce over the Internet, making it ecommerce. Imagine that you are planning to travel to Mexico and wanted to find a book about that country that is relevant to your travel. If the store is a large one, and you are unable to find the book yourself, you may ask one of the store’s assistants to help you by naming the subject of your interest. The process is very similar in the case of ecommerce through web hosting, and the way an Internet search engine locates the required item, but there’s a big difference. The search engine cannot ask you further questions to clarify what exactly you want, and therefore will show you all the available books that satisfy the word or words you use to describe your requirement. Moreover, the Internet has a vast pool of resources and therefore returns a huge number of results. Looking at it from the point of view of someone who sells on the Internet through ecommerce, that person has to be very careful in selecting the keywords to describe the web-hosting site used for ecommerce. So it becomes important to understand how search engines rank websites.

How keywords are used to measure the relevance of a site

In the above example, if you were moving through the bookstore on your own looking for the book that you wanted, how would you decide which book satisfied your requirement? You would look at the titles of the books to decide whether a particular book is worth opening and looking into. Then you would open the book, and scan the first few paragraphs and then look into the book randomly. Search engines employ a very similar approach. They look at the title and the keywords in it, then look at the beginning of your web hosting content, and finally go through the rest of the content. They also decide the relevance of a web-hosting site to a particular keyword based on the keyword density, that is, the number of times the keyword has been used.

Why search engines differ in their results

If all search engines employed the same criteria, the results should also be the same, but as you would know if you have surfed the net and tried to search for anything, different search engines return different results. That’s because each search engine employs its own variation of the procedure and may add additional criteria. Although there may be variations in the details, all search engines do give importance to the keywords, their presence in the title, how early they occur, and how frequently they are used in the text.

Other criteria commonly employed

Although the procedure described above would certainly give the search engines information about how relevant a web hosting site’s content is to a particular keyword entered by someone searching the web, it is possible to mislead the search engines by artificially increasing the keywords and placing them in such a manner as to increase the rankings, although the actual content in the web hosting site may not really warrant this. So search engines use a few indirect methods also. The chief among them is an analysis of the links to and from the web hosting site, and more importantly how often these links are used. After all, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. That means that you cannot really fool the search engines in the long run. Search engines employ a process of link analysis to determine the number of sites to which a particular web-hosting site is linked, the importance and relevance of those sites to the keyword, and the importance and rankings of those sites.

Search engines employ a complex mix of the factors described above and other factors that they feel are important. In the final analysis, a good search engine is interested to find out how relevant your web-hosting site is to a given keyword, and how well the site is externally linked. Finally, as traffic grows to your web-hosting site, the ranking will also improve. An understanding of the manner in which search engines rank web hosting sites might be crucial to success in ecommerce.