Search Optimization

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How search results are organized? Once website searchbot has used your SEO search terms to gather "hits" from its database, it ranks the resulting websites in order of their search relevance. The procedures and factors used to create this ranking are often company SEO secrets. So understanding exactly why one website is listed higher than another is difficult.

The following is a survey of some of the search factors search bots use to index websites:

SEO Relevance Prediction - Currently, searchbots predict relevance based on two sets of factors: those based on a website's content and those external to the website.

Factors based on a web website's content:

Word frequency (How often search terms occur in a page in relationship to other text)
Location of search terms in the document (Are they in the title? Are they near the top of the page?)
Relational clustering (How many pages in the website contain the search terms?)
The website's design (Does it use frames? How fast does it load?)

Factors external to the website

Link popularity - websites with more links pointing to them are prioritized
Click popularity - websites viwebsited more often are prioritized
Sector" popularity - websites viwebsited by certain demographic or social groups are prioritized
Business alliances among services - Results from a partner search service are ranked higher
Pay-for-placement rankings - website owners pay for high rankings

Content - A search program's content is its database of web websites - the information assembled by its spider program. Each search program has its own style and technology that sets it apart.

The SEO Spider - Because every search program's spider is programmed to search for and retrieve websites in its own particular way, each search program has its own unique database.