The Search Engine Ranking Criteria Each search engine has its own unique ranking criteria and its own unique algorithm or formula giving different weighting to each criteria in its formula. For the search engines that you have decided to focus on from Step 1 you have to learn as much as you can about their ranking criteria and relative weighting. The search engines are all fighting for market share. The more market share a search engine has the more valuable the company is. To gain market share a search engine has to provide better results than its competition. It is for this reason that the search engines are changing and improving their formulas on an ongoing basis. You have to keep up with changes in these formulas, tweak your site accordingly and resubmit when necessary. The search engines use different databases for their search results. They have different algorithms or formulas for their ranking. They have different weighting for the various elements within their formula. They change their formulas over time and they change their ranking over time. Sound complicated? It is not as daunting as it might sound because the major search engines tend to look at similar information, but weight the relevancy for particular items differently in their algorithms. That having been said, here are the most important areas on a Web page that you must address when performing organic search engine optimization: Title tags (page titles) Keywords meta-tags Description meta-tags Alt tags Hypertext links (e.g., anchor text) Domain names and file names Body text (beginning, middle, and end of page copy; headers) Between the “NOFRAMES†tag of framed Web sites. Page titles and text-based page content are the most important of the noted placement areas. Keyword meta-tags are not as critical as they once were, but are still applicable for some engines. Because Google is the favorite search engine for the time being, let’s take a closer look at how it ranks pages. Google uses the Open Directory database for its directory listings and its internal index for its primary search listings. Google has many other features as well, some of which include: An images search Usenet news data database A news search feature Froogle (a shopping search tool) A catalog search Advertising services through the Google AdWords programs. The ranking formula for Google’s main search function looks for the keywords in the visible body text (not in the meta-tags), headers tags, title tags, hypertext links, Alt tags, and gives a very heavy weighting to the link popularity with extra points for quality of links and relevancy of text around the links. More and more of the search engines are giving heavy weighting to link popularity—that is the number of links to your site from other sites on the Internet. The search engines are getting very sophisticated in the weighting of link popularity, with some search engines giving extra points for link relevancy—that is how high the site with the link to your site would rank for the same keyword. Other points are awarded based on the keywords around the link.