Articles > How does search engine optimisation work?
How it works
There are two basic aspects of performing well on the search engines: the general presence of your site, and the specific relevance of your content to the user's search term. Your site's general presence is determined by a number of factors, including its accessibility for search engine 'robots' (computer applications which list and review site content), the size of your site and the number of other sites that link to yours.
General presence
Search engines act on the assumption that if you have a larger, focussed site and lots of similar sites linking to yours, then your content is likely to be more relevant and useful to their users. One indication of this is your Google pagerank, a score that Google gives out of 10 to every web page it has listed. To find your score, visit www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php. Google itself has 9/10, as does the BBC, and the Bluelinemedia site (at last time of checking) has 5/10 - our new client websites typically achieve 3-4/10, and increase over time.
Relevance
The second aspect of search engine performance is the relevance of your site to the user's search. This is not just about appearing number 1 on certain phrases - it would be very easy to pick an obscure phrase and appear in the top position, but that doesn't mean anyone actually searches for it. It is more important to find the most appropriate keywords and do well under them.
The relevance of your site content is determined by your site text (phrases in bold or headings are seen as more important by the search engines), your 'meta' content (title, description and keywords), and the text contained within any website links that point to your pages (whether from your site or an external site).
