Every day billions of people use the internet to find what they are looking for, but how does the Google Algorithm work? Statistics show that there are nearly 15,000,000 active websites on the internet today. The search engines job is to go through all of the websites and provide the most useful information based on the search query; complex algorithms are used to do this and in short these are instructions that tell computers how to complete a certain task.
The search engine algorithms do the work for you by finding the most relevant pages based on the keywords you used in the search boxes, the pages that appear contain the keywords in the web pages that you used and a rank is assigned to each page based on different factors. The highest quality pages appear higher up in the SERP’s, this means that essentially the best quality websites are near the top, but this is not always the case.
The way the keywords are placed have an impact on how Google finds your website, as you would expect Google looks for the keywords on the web page but as you might have guessed there are sections which Google think are more important than others. Elements such as the page title, headings are all more important to try and get your keywords in, however don’t just add keywords for the sake of it, don’t overuse terms.
Google’s search function is similar to other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing. Crawlers and spiders go through the web and move around the different links that you have on the website building up an index page that includes specific keywords. The spiders can also be programmed to have more advanced features such as being able to detect the difference between web pages with re-direct sites (pages that are there to re-direct traffic to another web page) and actual content.
Webmasters believe there are around 200 ranking factors which Google use (there may well be more that Google keep secret), here is a link to an infographic off all the known Google ranking factors.
