How search engines like Google determine search engine positioning of any particular site is not exactly known but of all the search engines Google is probably the most well known and is responsible for roughly sixty percent of all searches carried out in the US alone, with the number being slightly higher in other places.  It is so popular in fact that the terms  “google” and “googling” are now used by many people to describe searching on the Internet.  For this reason, google should be the primary target in your SEO plan.  Achieving a top ranking in google for a highly searched for term is the aim of most webmasters and for good reason.

Google works by use of an algorithm (formula or calculation) that is constantly being updated and adapted, but there are some factors that remain consistent.  The reason the algorithm is updated frequently is to stop webmasters and professional search engine optimizers from manipulating the search results.  Google and other search engines like Yahoo and Bing work on the basis that their search results are accurate and relevant.  The success and popularity of a search engine is determined by how useful it is to its users.  Having your website listed on the first page of Google can result in thousands of targeted traffic (visitors) finding your site each day, making it obvious why some website owners would be willing to attempt to manipulate the results.

Targeted traffic is, by far the most profitable traffic for any website, these types of visitors are specifically looking for the information or products you are providing and are much more likely to purchase than any other source of traffic.  If a search engine repeatedly fails to deliver the relevant information to the searcher they will fall in popularity meaning less advertisers will want to display their ads on the search results and the company will lose revenue.

This leads to the battle between webmasters, SEO companies and search engines.  Anyone publishing information online does so with the hope of having their content found, whether for popularity or profit, the target is the same.  Website owners want their websites to be found.
Google wants to deliver the most relevant results to its users and Search Engine Optimization Companies want their clients sites to rank highly.  In theory this should make for a great partnership, in reality this means competition and search results are open to manipulation, every website cannot rank first or even second and competition can be extremely tough, which is why people employ various methods of SEO to help their website achieve a higher ranking.

There is a lot of money to be made by ranking high for a popular search term and when profits are at stake, many are willing to attempt to manipulate the system.  Website owners are competing against one another and the google algorithm to achieve a top page listing.  Google wants the most informative and useful site listed first.  So how exactly does Google determine which site should be first?

Search Engine Positioning – How is it calculated?

Since it would be impossible to do any other way, search engines use a formula or algorithm to determine a sites popularity, relevancy and usefulness for any particular search term.  Search engines like Google use software known as bots or spiders to read web pages and gather the information that is stored on them. Once they have gathered what they consider to be the predominant information from any given page they use their own formula/calculations (their algorithm) to determine the search engine positioning for that page.

Search engines do not want you to know how their algorithm works, if anyone knew how it worked it would make positioning your site in the top pages much easier, which could be open to being abused.  There are however some facts that are known about how the search spiders crawl a web page.

Taking google as an example, when somebody types in a search term such as “SEO tips” the search engine then conducts the search, looking firstly for pages that contain the exact phrase “SEO tips” and positions those sites accordingly, it then searches for pages that either have the all the words in the page, although maybe not in the correct order and also the pages that contain all of the words close together on the page or even perhaps related terms.  For example after it has found the exact matches for “SEO tips” it will then look for similar terms such as “SEO-Tips”, “Tips SEO” or perhaps “Tips for SEO”.  Depending on the volume of results it may go even further bringing in related terms such as “SEO Tricks” and so on.

However, this is only one factor for determining search engine positioning.  Search engines take many factors into account for each and every search conducted.  They may put weight on where the exact phrase is located on the page in question and how often it is used on the page as well as how many related terms are used on the page (relevancy) Not only do the spiders crawl the visible page, they also crawl the source code (HTML) for the page.  They will also take into account how many other related sites are linking into the page, how many links are pointing away from the site as well as how the links are formed.

The algorithm places varying weight on each factor, the use of the keyword, the on page relevance and off page popularity.  It is not known exactly how each is weighted but once the search engine has found this information, it then sorts the search engine positioning for the query and returns the results to the searcher.  This is all done is a very short amount of time and the aim of the search engines is to return the results that they have deemed most relevant to the query in the fastest time possible.

While there are different SEO techniques that can be utilized to improve your own sites positioning, there are also some that are frowned upon by search engines, the methods that are commonly used and are considered acceptable are usually referred to as White hat SEO while the methods and techniques used that are considered manipulation are known as black hat.  Black hat methods can get your site de-indexed and removed entirely from the search engines and are not advisable uses of SEO.

You can read these white hat SEO Tips for more information on the accepted uses of SEO to help your website achieve optimum search engine positioning.