Those who are just starting to break onto the website scene want to be featured on all of the major search websites. To many, however, the ranking on search engines seems random, and based on popularity. Those who are trying to get their website on a search engine should realize that while popularity is a part of the equation, there are many other factors to how search engines rank web sites for the search results. While each search engine will have it’s own way as to how it filters results, there are four things that every search engine relies heavy on for its results.

The main thing that search engines are looking for is the page (or pages) that offer the most information on the topic. This is determined by the frequency of the key words available on the actual website. If someone searches for “Search Engine Rank”, the search engine will look for the websites that have the best frequency of “search engine rank” available; too little will garner no results, and too high of a frequency may have an adverse effect.

Another thing that search engines are looking for is the actual location of those specific keywords. The search engines want to know how soon the web page is actually getting into the information that the person is search for. If the keywords appear toward the top of the page, the website will rank higher. If the keywords do not show up until later in the page, they will rank low, or will not even rank on the search engine results at all.

Many people take the idea of the keyword and over-do it. They try to place the keyword on the webpage as much as possible. To protect results against this, search engines will actually cut out results that are deemed to have too many key words. They feel that the webpage is attempting to “spam” the search engine by simply featuring multiple keywords excessive amounts of time without actually having information about the specific keyword.

Search engine results do take popularity into account when ranking the websites for keywords. Those web pages that rank high on results but are not often clicked on will find that they are dropped on the results page. This is something that is not controllable, as it simply relies on how often your link is chosen when shown on a search engine results page.

Trying to get a website to show up on the top results of a search engine’s results can be difficult and confusing for many. While getting the results wanted may be easy for certain topics, it may be incredibly difficult for others. Taking all of the aspects of how search engines rank web sites can help you to understand exactly what needs to be done to rank as high as physically possible on search engine result pages.