Here is some important insight from Matt Cutt’s explaining page rank and search engine rank position.

The Importance of keywords 

Suppose someone comes to Google and types in civil war. In order to present and score the results, we need to do two things:

1. Find the set of pages that contain the user’s query somewhere
2. Rank the matching pages in order of relevance”

So the next step is to build an index. To do this, we “invert” the crawl data; instead of having to scan for each word in every document, we juggle our data in order to list every document that contains a certain word. For example, the word “civil” might occur in documents 3, 8, 22, 56, 68, and 92, while the word “war” might occur in documents 2, 8, 15, 22, 68, and 77.Once we’ve built our index, we’re ready to rank documents and determine how relevant they are.

Linking Stratagies and Their Importance

Once the keywords are used to decide which web pages should be displayed as results, Google then uses it’s secret algorithms to decide which order these web pages should be shown.

Now we have the set of pages that contain the user’s query somewhere, and it’s time to rank them in terms of relevance. Google uses many factors in ranking. Of these, the PageRank algorithm might be the best known. PageRank evaluates two things: how many links there are to a web page from other pages, and the quality of the linking sites. With PageRank, five or six high-quality links from websites such as www.cnn.com and www.nytimes.com would be valued much more highly than twice as many links from less reputable or established sites. But we use many factors besides PageRank. For example, if a document contains the words “civil” and “war” right next to each other, it might be more relevant than a document discussing the Revolutionary War that happens to use the word “civil” somewhere else on the page. Also, if a page includes the words “civil war” in its title, that’s a hint that it might be more relevant than a document with the title “19th Century American Clothing.” In the same way, if the words “civil war” appear several times throughout the page, that page is more likely to be about the civil war than if the words only appear once.

Quotes taken from Googles Newsletter to Librarians. 

Another great place to keep up-to-date on Google happenings is Matt Cutts blog.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2006 at 7:07 am and is filed under Hot off The Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.