Monday, October 15, 2007

What Is a Ranking?

A ranking on a search engine is a web page’s listing and relative placement on a results page (known as a SERP) for a certain search query. As an example, if you type house plans into the search box at Google, you will get those listings displayed (10 listings per page by default) that Google deems most relevant to the search phrase house plans, sorted in order of relative importance.

The most relevant and most important web pages are listed in descending order.For Google, page relevancy is dependent on how well a web page matches a specific word search. Page importance on the other hand is dependent on the quality and quantity of links that point to your web page from other websites. The concept of link quality is important and will be discussed in a later chapter.

If your site does not appear in the top 20 for your most important keywords (search terms), you might as well forget getting much traffic from Google or from any other search engine. Because many people never go past the first page for a search result, you really need to be in the top 10.

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