Chrysalis Websolutions - Search Engine Positioning Video Blog

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This is my first video titled “Understanding the search engines”. I hope you enjoy it! The following is a transcript of the video:

By understanding the fundamentals of search engines you can get better search engine positioning, know the difference between good and bad SEO, and hopefully understand why some techniques work and others don’t. Reading Google’s webmaster guidelines and research papers by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (founders of Google) gives us great insight on how the search engines work.

The search engines are complex but we can simplify the process into 3 simple steps.

1) Crawling:

The search engine gives a list of URLs to the spider
Spider fetches these web pages and compresses then stores them for later use.
When doing a search for “shopping online” we can see an example of these stored or cached websites. These are a snapshot of the website the last time the spider visited it so they might be outdated.

2) Indexing:

Uncompress files and get what it wants from them (usually getting rid of all the junk like html tags).
Create a database of the words that appear on the website associated with their properties. Properties include position, type, document it was in etc.
Create anchor file that has info such as where each link points from and to as well as the anchor text.

Sample Database and Anchor file

3) Rank and Serve: When someone makes a search for lets say “Search Engine Positioning”

Search engines will find all documents that have the keywords in their database.
Search engines will need to rank them and serve the top 1000 so they use different ranking factors
Google has over 200 factors and the most prominent ones that we’ll discuss in this video are: Pagerank, anchor text, and proximity.
Pagerank that I’m talking about is not the same one that shows up on the Google toolbar – this one is updated very frequently since Google can calculate millions of PRs in a very short amount of time. The toolbar pagerank is not updated sometimes for a year. The more websites that link to you the higher your real pagerank – since it’s intuitive that the documents that get cited the most are worthy of ranking high.
Anchor text is another ranking factor – web pages will get credit for keywords that are in the anchor text of links pointing to them. So if someone links to you using the keyword “shopping online” you may rank higher for that term.
Proximity is also another factor that may affect your positioning in google. By looking at the database and keyword positions we can see what words are close to each other. So if someone searches for “shop now” this sample website will have a higher chance of ranking better because the two words are in positions 4 and 5 (close to each other).

The search engines’ main goal is to satisfy the searchers by giving the best results – that’s why they work very hard to fight spam. It’s your job as a webmaster or SEO to use white hat techniques to provide the searchers with relevant results and you’ll be rewarded with long term search engine positioning. So what did we learn? Let’s summarize things really quick:

Google only indexes what they need. As long as they can crawl and index your website they don’t care whether its html, php, etc.
Anchor text matters! If people link to you using your keywords in the anchor text you will get better rankings so ask people to include your keywords.
Proximity of keywords matters! For example if you’re trying to rank for “shopping online” you’ll have more success if those words are close together on the website rather than separately.
Pagerank matters! (And I’m talking about the real pagerank not the one on the Google toolbar) The more you get cited/linked to the better your rank. Just remember quality over quantity because quality websites will have higher pageranks to pass to you.

I hope you have enjoyed this first video and I would love to hear your opinion and suggestions. I will be making many more videos in the near future so feel free to suggest topics!