Well, we can probably agree without even knowing why that it may be in the best interests of an internet business to approach a search engine with the most effectively designed and organized website. While it is somewhat self evident that a well designed and effective website may be a good sales tool when dealing with humans, it might not be so evident why you have to be so concerned when dealing with a search engine.

Let’s start with the fact that while we are trying to display our internet business to human eyes, it is the spiders of the search engines which must first be appeased. After all, according to whose figures you believe, up to 85% of all websites visited are found through search engines and directories. When you consider all the people looking around the internet for all kinds of “stuff” you can begin to grasp the power search engines have in the online marketplace.
Add into the mix the fact that for any given search term, there are thousands, millions, or even billions of possible sites that may meet the query terms provided by the human searcher and you begin to grasp the vast competition going on at any given time for any given subject.

Out of those potentially billions of pages which may be presented to the searcher by the search engine, only about ten or so will fit on a page. Therefore, if you are not on the first page, it’s almost as if you are not there at all. I don’t need to explain this to you if you have ever used a search engine, How many times have YOU bothered going on to page two, and especially page three?

Another aspect of searcher versus search engine is something that anyone who has been on the internet for a week has discovered. You have to be especially specific when doing searches or you could wind up with some really worthless results.
As you can see, it becomes imperative that your page get listed in the first ten results returned by the search engine.

How does a search engine decide which pages come first?

Actually, each search engine has its own method of assigning value to each website it visits and chooses to include in its listings. These determining factors are included in the instructions given the spiders which visit the sites and the software controlling the listings on the search engine site. There are often humans as well who can override the decisions of the software judges. This is what can make SEO a little difficult. What is top priority for one search engine may not figure in as strongly for another. Of course, everyone is trying to figure out how to second guess Google, but don’t forget, there are other search engines also providing traffic to a great many sites as well.

If you have figured out by now that I have danced around the question, you are right. You see, not much is actually known about the exact science by which search engines, particularly Google, select and rank the pages they show in response to a searcher’s query. However, a lot can be deduced by looking at some of the sites that DO make it to the top of the list.