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Introduction to Search Engine Positioning: Types of Search Engines and Listing versus Ranking

(February 1, 2004 - Westchester County, NY)

After a 30% jump in Internet sales for the last two months of 2003, Jupiter Research expects online sales to increase by a compound annual growth rate of 17 percent through 2008. One way smaller businesses can get a share of those sales is to be found on search engines by consumers.

According to Internet marketing expert J.K. Bowman, publisher of Spider Food (www.spider-food.net), “if you use the Internet to run or promote a business, nothing is more important to your success than being listed with the search engines. They are your customer's tool of choice for locating Internet products and services - outranking banner advertising and all other forms of media.”

Very broadly speaking, a search allows you to enter words or phrases into a search box (your query), and after submitting them, returns a listing of websites that the engine deems related to what you entered (your results).

There are three basic types of search engines, and each has a unique ways of deciding which websites it’ll list in response to your query.

Directory types, like Yahoo!, are similar to yellow pages phone directories. Human editors organize websites into categories, and results are frequently listed alphabetically within category.

Pay-to-play types, like Overture, collect bids for popular search terms so that you pay for each visitor the engine sends. Higher bids mean higher placements in results.

The type we focus on in this article are the “true” search engines. These engines send out software programs, or robots, to scan through pages on the Internet and store the results in an index, or database. The scanning process is often referred to as “crawling” or “spidering,” alluding to the metaphor of the Internet as a Web, and the robots are referred to as “spiders” or “crawlers.” Google and Altavista are examples of this type of search engine.

A spider finds web sites by following hyperlinks on other websites it already has in its index, and from lists of submissions it receives from people who want a site to be included in the index.

After a spider has crawled a site and added it to their index, that site is officially listed in that search engine. How close to the top that site will appear in the results of a search depends on what words or phrases are typed in a query. If a query has nothing to do with the topic of the website, that site shouldn’t appear at all in the results of that particular search.

A search engine ranking is the position within the results that a web site appears – almost everyone hopes his website will appear on the few pages of results and ideally as the first result when someone enters a query that relates to his site’s topic.

There are millions of websites competing for the top positions for popular words and phrases. So how does the search engine decide who gets first place?

Each search engine uses a calculation, or algorithm, to decide how important a site is for any particular term. According to Google, their “order of results is automatically determined by more than 100 factors.” This calculation may include factors such as how many times the term appears on your website, how many pages are in your website, how many other websites have hyperlinks to yours and elements in the HTML code in which your site is written – things that human viewers don’t even see.

Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, advises that “it's important to make a distinction between search engine submission and search engine optimization…. ‘Search engine submission’ refers to the act of getting your web site listed with search engines. Getting listed does not mean that you will necessarily rank well for particular terms, however. It simply means that the search engine knows your pages exist…. ‘Search engine optimization’ refers to the act of altering your site so that it may rank well for particular terms.”