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Having a Search Engine Placement on the first page of results of a related search can be the best form of Online Marketing for a organisation. If done intelligently it can narrow down the necessity for any other forms of Online Marketing. In this article we will look at the factors search engines use to calculate the placement of a web site in its results page, from the original search engines to the more developed search engines.

In the beginning of the world wide web it was nearly impossible to view any new web site, unless there was a link to it from a web site that was already known to you. It was not long until a solution to this situation was found and the search engine began.

Search engines are only good if they consistently calculate which web pages are relevant, compared with the parameters typed into the search engine. The internet user types keywords into a search engine, these are words that they think are the most relevant to the goods or services they are searching for. In the early days of search engines they used relatively simple approaches to calculate the relevance of web pages. The search engines basically counted the frequency of times keywords were featured on a webpage, and the more times they were featured the more relevant the web page was considered to be, and therefore the higher the Search Engine Placement the web page was awarded.

It was not long before search engine Optimization companies were created to take advantage of this approach. Most of them abused the system as it was simple to do, many keywords were hidden on the webpage to improve its Search Engine Placement, often these keywords were not relevant to the webpage, but as they were hidden the visitors did not notice them. The keywords were however typed in to search engines in vast numbers, therefore raising the amount of visitors to a web site. It was not long before the search engines noticed this and started penalising the sites that adopted these approaches.

Further to that, the search engines made their approaches for deciding relevance a lot more complex, to make them more consistent and harder to abuse, as well as meta tag descriptions and meta tag keywords being added to HTML codes to make the search engines job more simple.

The newer, more complex approaches, to calculate relevance of a web page, not only works on the frequency of times a keyword appears on the webpage, but also on where it appears on the web page. This is carried out by weighting the keywords, depending on where they are featured on a web page.

Again a Search Engine Optimization Company soon discovered where to feature keywords to improve the Search Engine Placement of a web page. No one predicted the search engines themselves to know the exact weights given to each position. This is a list of positions to place keywords in descending weight order, web address, web page file name, web page title, meta tag description, web pages H1 heading, web page H2 heading, any bold text, web page’s text and lastly the file names and “alt” text of pictures.

This was the way search engines operated for some time until Google came along and added a further layer to calculate the relevance of a webpage, and therefore its Search Engine Placement. This was to add up the frequency of links that pointed to a web page, the larger number of links the higher the Search Engine Placement it was awarded. The thought behind this was if people liked the web page’s contents they would want to show them to the world by putting a link to them.

It was not long until a Search Engine Optimization Company knew this and began to add link building to its Optimization approaches.