Search Ranking:
The position of your website in the results list a search engine returns for a given search.

Last week we looked at search engine spiders, which are an automated way that search engines build their index.

I should have mentioned, one way to tell if your site is being indexed is to use the search engine saturation tool that Marketleap.com offers.  Give it the URL of your website, and it will tell you how many pages the most popular search engines “see”(or have indexed) on your site.

OK - onto rankings and keywords.

First - realize that there are people out there for whom monitoring and improving search ranking is a daily job, as their living depends on it.  For an eCommerce site, moving from the first-page results in Google to the second page can mean bankruptcy.

Second - realize that the exact formula that a search engine like Google uses is proprietary - they’re not going to tell you, in great detail, how they build results pages.  Why?  Because there are people and companies out there who would use that information to artifically improve their rankings, and the search engine companies don’t like to be manipulated.

And so what happens in the search results field is somewhat of a cat and mouse game.  People figure out how to artificially improve their rankings, then search engine company changes how it calculates the rankings to eliminate the artificial factors.

And - this is important - often the search engine company penalizes sites that used any artificial means to improve rankings.  Keep this in mind when Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies come knocking on your door - often these companies use a grab bag of current “tricks” to improve your rankings - trick which will work for a short time, then get your site banished from any decent results lists.

But we can’t talk about search rankings without talking about “keywords”, as any ranking is going to be based on results for a specific keyword.  For our purposes, we’re going to define them as

Keywords:

The words or phrases that people type into search engines.

Put another way, keywords are the words that you want your site to be ranked well for.  These are usually terms relating to your business, products, or services.

Keywords are also used in purchasing advertising on search engines - you tell the search engine to display your ad when someone searches on a specific word or phrase.  This is the subject of a whole article in itself, so we’ll set that aspect of keywords aside for a moment.

So how to best choose keywords to focus on?  Good question.  And based on the length of this post, one better answered in another installment of Search 101.