Making It Easy to Find Your Site : Part 2

Determining Your Ranking

Each search engine arranges its search results in some manner. Complicated algorithms are used to determine which Web pages best match a given set of search terms. Search engine staff spend a lot of time tuning the algorithms in order to return the most relevant results possible to all kinds of queries. Even though the search service itself is free, it's all about making money: The better the results, the more the search engine is used; the more the search engine is used, the more money the search engine company makes by selling related services.

You don't just want your site to be listed by a search engine; you want your pages to rank high in the search results. Being ranked in the top ten sites for a given keyword is a surefire way to generate traffic for your site, especially if you can nab the first or second spot on the list. Of course, every other site owner wants the same thing, so you'll face stiff competition to get one of those prized rankings.

The PageRank Formula The PageRank formula was created by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. The relative importance of a particular page is calculated according to the number of other pages that link to it and how important those other pages are themselves. A basic description of the formula is found on the Google Web site at www.google.com/technology, but see the list at www.memwg.com/pagerank for more details about the formula.

How search engines rank individual pages is a matter of great debate among Web site owners. For competitive reasons, search engines rarely disclose more than vague details about their page-ranking algorithms. Even the famous PageRank formulathe one that determines a site's popularity by counting the number of other sites that link to itis just a small (though important) part of Google's ranking algorithm.

PageRank Tools

Firefox and Mozilla users can download an open-source browser extension that displays the current page's PageRank in the browser's status bar. See www.memwg.com/ pagerank for details.

Competition isn't the only reason search engines keep their algorithms proprietary. Once key algorithms like the PageRank formula are generally known, site owners start to adapt their pages specifically for the algorithms in order to favorably skew the search engine results their way. For example, link farmsgroups of Web sites created specifically to increase the number of links to targeted pageswere used early on to bump up Google page rankings. Search engines are constantly monitoring and adjusting their search algorithms in order to avoid this kind of overt manipulation.

The simplest way to determine a page's ranking is to search using page-related keywords and see where the page ends up in the search results. Since your site is keyword-driven itself (to display more relevant ads), this should yield fairly accurate results.

Another way to determine page ranking is to use Google's Toolbar (Figure 9.6). The Toolbar, currently available only for Internet Explorer, can display a page's relative PageRank on a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being the most important and 0 the least. The higher the PageRank, the higher your page's ranking within a search.

Improving Your Ranking

As long as you're not doing it deceptively or fraudulently, there's nothing wrong with trying to improve your site's search engine rankings. This is what search engine optimization (SEO) is all about.

Do You Crawl Here Often?

Improving your site's search engine rankings is a slow process because it depends on how often search engines crawl your site, and that may happen as seldom as every few weeksthere's no set schedule.

There are two basic techniques for improving a page's ranking. The first is to ensure that the page has good content and good keyword density. This should be a no-braineryou should already be creating your pages this way if you want AdSense to display relevant ads. Watch for missing keywords, thoughtry to figure out what people are really searching for and make sure your page gets included in the search results.

The other technique is to get highly ranked pages to link to your page. This increases the relative importance of your own page, especially if the anchor text of the link (the text that the user clicks to activate the link) contains keywords relevant to your site. While this technique works especially well with Google, where the popularity of a page is a fundamental part of the PageRank formula, all search engines use incoming links as an important ranking tool. Note that the reverse can also be true: Incoming links from poorly ranked pagesespecially those that have been removed from search engine indexes due to overt attempts at page-rank manipulationwill drag down the page's ranking.

As you might imagine, obtaining high-quality incoming links to your site can be a challenge. You can try to initiate a link swap with the other site, whereby you both agree to link to each other's sitesthe classic "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" situation. But link swaps only work if both parties feel they have something to gain from the relationship.

Of course, if you have unique, useful content, other sites will start linking to yours without any prompting on your part. This can be a mixed blessing, however, because you have no control over the quality of those incoming links.