Google – Trying to Make the Web a Better Place
Google is the number one search engine in use today; in fact it has so much of the market share that the brand name has become synonymous with searching on the web. Optimizing a web page to get to the top of Google’s search pages is a difficult and much discussed topic. There are two main things web pages are ranked on, the page itself and links to the page, as explained in the “Search Engine Optimization In-depth” post. This article also provides an outline of how effective a number of website elements and search engine optimization techniques are for how a website is ranked.
Google provides an outline of the factors that its algorithm uses to rank web pages in their Webmaster Guidelines. These guidelines are boiled down into the three broad topics of having a good layout, good quality content, and other sites link to you, by the post “Search Marketing 101”. Google is trying to provide the most relevant results to make searching the web easier for everyone and will delete any websites from its database if they are trying to manipulate the system. The techniques to avoid, as they are commonly used to manipulate search engine results, are also provided in the Webmaster Guidelines.
Creating content for a site is something that is in your control to do, however the other main component of search rankings are in the amount and quality of links to your web page. The entry “Google Reveals More Linking Secrets To Webmasters” looks at what links are considered quality. Google expects linking to other sites to be done with the user in mind; links that are quality are ones that offer value to a visitor’s experience. So for example, a directory of unrelated links is not a quality link but a reference in a blog entry is.
By changing their algorithm and not providing an exact formula for how they rank sites Google is trying to reward websites that are providing content for their users with higher search rankings instead of those that aim to be perfectly optimized to achieve the best search engine results.
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