Search Logic and Ranking Logic
How engines think

Search Logic
When search engines search with a specific keyword they use a number of different criteria to locate a relevant webpage AND to rank it in the results returned to the user.
The criteria can include:

  • How many times the keyword(s) appear in the title of the webpage (seen in the top or bottom bar of most browsers)
  • How many times the keyword(s) appear in bigger font sizes
  • How many times the keyword(s) appear in the first line of a webpage
  • How many times the keyword(s) appear in the webpage
  • How many times the keyword(s) appear in the website of which the webapge is a part of.
  • How many times the keyword(s) appear the meta tag of the webpage (part of the coding of the webpage that the webpage author uses to help engine spiders find and categorize the webpage)

Ranking Logic
When the engine returns the results to the user it uses one or more of the above criteria to rank the results by.  Often the different criteria will have different weight, or influence, in the ranking logic. There is usually some combination of weight of the criteria and the number of times the criteria is met that will determine the rank of pages.

Previous