How do the search engines rank websites?

When someone “searches” for something on the Internet they generally use a search engine, like Google™. They type in what they are looking for and up comes a list of websites. They are broken into “Sponsored” results, and “Organic” results. The Sponsored results are paid search advertising (Search Engine Marketing) which we will discuss later in Lesson 4. For now let’s focus on the organic search results, which are the large block (1-10) of listing in the main portion of the search results page.

Trust, Relevancy, and Authority determine rankings

In this example, according to Google™ azcentral.com is a trusted, more relevant, and has more authority on the topic of Arizona real estate than these other websites. How did they do it? Let’s look at relevancy, Authority and Trust a bit closer.

Trust

A website earns trust by being a good citizen on the Internet. A trusted website is one that:

Does not link to bad neighborhoods (adult sites, gambling, fraud scams) or anywhere that is too far off topic.
Has been around for a while (a year or more).
Has good up-time and speed (reliable and easy to get to).
Has NOT done anything considered “spammy”: stuffing keywords, link farming, etc.
In our example, all 4 of these website have built up trust.

Putting it all together

For your website to be the top dog in the organic search results, your website has to prove that it can be trusted, it is more relevant to the topic and audience than the other guys, and has built up authority on the topic. This really boils down to writing solid content that is concise and on topic to the search phrases your customers are using, and promoting your website online to build incoming links. THIS is what search engine optimization is all about.

Why do Top rankings matter to me?

Pardon the cliche: Location location location. Your potential customer is out there right now searching for a product or service that you offer. We are not talking a few dozen prospects; we are talking thousands, even millions, even tens of millions depending on your product or service.

No one uses the phone book anymore

When was the last time you used one? If you are not on top of Google™, Yahoo™, and MSN™, your business does not exist (a stretch, but you get the idea).

Organic vs. Paid

We will cover Paid search Advertising aka pay-per-click aka Search Engine Marketing later in this series. The main difference to point out here is that there are 2 sets of results on every page. The “Sponsored” results are bought by advertisers, and the organic results are earned as we discussed above. There was a time when the internet’s public in general did not know the difference between sponsored and organic results. The public is now catching on and the general internet audience is aware that “Sponsored” ad’s are a form of paid advertising.

A few quick facts why location matters

Here is a general rule of thumb for the distribution of clicks on any given first page of organic results. Starting from #1 - #10: 35%, 15%, 7.5%, 5%, 2.5%, 2.5%, 2.5%, 2.5%, 5%, 10%. It’s interesting to see how being at the bottom of the page is actually better than being in the middle. Bottom line: #1 gets the gold. Here is a general rule of thumb on the distribution of clicks from page’s 1 - 3 or results #1 - #30: 94%, 5%, 1%. Bottom Line: #1 gets the gold.

Lesson 2: SEO On-Page Factors

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