Search engines

Hand on heart. What would you have thought of when you heard the word „search engines“ back in 1993?

Today it is the magic word for almost all website operators. Almost no one who doesn't know what a search engine is, hardly anyone who doesn't want their website to be ranked at the top of search engines.

And rightly so. Most web statistics show that visitors have primarily found the website via the Google search engine. However, this is only the case if the website ranks well in Google's SERPs, the Search Engine Ranking Pages. In other words, at the top for the desired search terms.

In short, search engines are databases that store the content of millions of websites. With the help of complex algorithms, they calculate which topics the individual pages deal with and how important these pages are compared to other pages. The search engines are created and continuously improved by programmers, but the order of the search results is not influenced manually (exception: at the request of a court or in the case of voluntary self-censorship by the search engines).

In principle, every website can be optimized to meet the requirements of search engines. If you are already working on your website, you might as well consider the requirements of the search engines.
In the USA, according to figures from the market research company Comscore Google's Market share of the US search engine market is close to the 60 percent mark. In Germany, the picture is one of a monopolist. As the 2006 statistics from WebHits could be inferred at that time Google in Germany the 90 percent hurdle at the Market share of the search engines. Second-placed Yahoo! only managed 3.3 percent. The figures are unlikely to have changed much since then.

Websites that are highly visible on Google therefore have a decisive advantage.

Google does not reveal how the results are ranked, but there are countless observations and experiments that allow us to draw good conclusions about the algorithm. And the basis of the search engine can be read as a publicly accessible PDF document by the two Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (google.pdf, 120 KB).

What measures are there to increase search engine friendliness?

• Under On-the-Page-Methods are measures that are carried out on the page itself.
• Under Off-the-Page-The "linking methods" are methods that are performed around this page, such as links from other websites, names of domains, directories and files, etc.