How search engines rank a webpage - Basic explanation

Basically, there are two main factors that search engines look for when ranking a webpage. The first is links and the second is content in no particular order of importance.

Links

Search Engines regard links as a vote of trust that is passed from the linking webpage to the receiving webpage. The better record of votes a webpage has, the more highly regarded that webpage will seem to a search engine demonstrating the fact that the webpage deserves a high ranking on the search engines.

How and where the webpage is linked from is the key for search engines to determine the rankings for the webpage. Factors such as strength of linking page, surrounding text, domain age, period of link, anchor text and much more is said to influence the search engine rankings for the webpage’s keywords.

Content

The other major factor is content and basically if you have good unique content for your visitors then chances are that the search engines will like it too. The Internet has billions of webpages and it’s the search engines job to provide the best content for their users based on what keywords were searched for.

Its a considerably harder to get an irrelevant webpage to rank for the same keyword than a relevant webpage. This may sound obvious but you’ll do well to keep this in mind.

You cannot discuss content on an Internet Marketing site without mentioning duplicate content. With so many pages, the search engines had a problem of the same content dominating its first page results for keywords which of course was unacceptable. Over the years search engines have developed checks in an attempt to provide much more meaningful search results for their users.

Obviously, getting top search engine rankings is much more complicated than writing a unique article and throwing hundreds of links at it. Other factors will come into play like search engine filters, penalties, domains, competition, etc which is discussed in detail in this blog and our forums.