Why websites show up on Google

Posted on May 25, 2010 // 0 Comments

Why some websites show up better on Google than others do!

One of the coolest parts about my job, is that when I am asked a question by a client, I am forced to think about what I naturally take for granted and summarize that into words… Therefore I can make posts like this that other people with websites might find interesting.

This question came from one of my newest clients, his website was launched within the past couple of weeks. First, I will post the question from that client and then my answer, allowing you to enjoy the full breadth of the conversation.

I am still not showing up in google searches until the 3rd or 4th page. What can we do about that?

The following was my answer. Keep in mind that it was specific to his website and application, but the subject material can be related to any search topic, or any geography.

As far as showing up on search engines, that is a really deep subject and this may not be the easy answer you seek, but the process typically takes weeks for the site to be included and begin showing up during searches, months for the search engine to determine what the site and all the pages within are relevant for and years for the site to become firmly established on search engines. Nobody, except the search engines themselves have any control over how sites are included or considered relevant. We’re talking about billions and billions of website domains worldwide, with potentially a seemingly infinite number of electronic documents to compare.

Here is the overview of the process that I provided to the client:

Website URL is submitted to search engines, (I submitted yours to Google, Yahoo and Bing).
Major search engines process the submission.
Search engines “include” the URL in their list of websites to crawl, (for example nobody knows how many websites Google has indexed, but it is believed to be in the order of 10′s of billions).
Search engines “crawl” or “spider” the website and catalog it’s content based on URL, Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Textual Page Content between tags.
Search engines begin to display the website and pages of the site, during live searches, in the organic results, for what it considers potential relevant matches.
Search engines track the human click factor, to determine if the website and pages within are thought to be relevant by people actually searching for information.
Search engines track the quality and quantity of inbound links, (other websites that link to your website).

Ultimately a search engine’s number one goal is to return organic search results that are as accurate as possible, as quickly as it can. Your website and it’s pages are displayed in what the search engine determines to be the correct relevance order for any given key phrase inputted by a search engine user, based on the following factors:

Person inputs a search query (search phrase or search word).
The search engine quickly compares that search string to all it’s indexed sites, (this will be billions of sites).
Search engine compares the URL (does the URL of the page match the person’s search query?)
Search engine compares the Page Title (does any page within the site have a page title that suggests it matches the search query?)
Search engine compares the Meta Descriptions (do any pages in the site have a description that matches the search query?)
Search engine compares the Body Text (does the page contain the search string?)
If the page is a match, the search engine compares the density combination of URL, Title, Description, Body Text against all other potential matches (millions or 100′s of 1000′s of sites).
If the page is a match, the search engine compares the quantity and quality of inbound links against all other potential matches (10′s of 1000′s of sites).
If the page is a match, the search engine compares how many real people have clicked through to the potentially matching sites, based on that search string? (1000′s of sites).

If several pages and / or websites have possible relevant matches, the search engine will also consider factors such as:

How long has the website been indexed at the search engine? (older sites show up better).
How long is the domain name registered for? (people that register domains for years at a time, are more likely to be serious and are in it for the long haul).
Where is the website hosted? (this is especially important for geographic related searches).
What is the average bounce rate of the site? (pages that nobody wants to look at for very long do worse, pages that people stay to look at perform better).

With that said (and I know that is a whole bunch of information to absorb), the fact that your site is ALREADY showing up on Page 2 at Google for as broad a search (and as valuable), as Fort Myers DJ is amazing. To put that into perspective, that means that Google considers YOUR website to be HIGHLY relevant for that term. So much so that it displays it in the Top 20 results of over 300,000 relevant matches. Imagine all the other web pages you might be competing against that have the words “Fort”, “Myers” and “DJ”.

As time goes by, you will be more an more impressed. Actually, based on my experience I’ll bet even right now I could find your website for a myriad of other RELEVANT key phrases. That is of course the main point… If you are searching for something, is YOUR page relevant for that term? Is it HIGHLY RELEVANT? Keep in mind that search engines ONLY KNOW TEXT. They can only understand words exactly as they are spelled, spaced, abbreviated, punctuated, etc. by the searcher at the end of a keyboard.

What I would suggest, is that if you open up a Google Site Analytics account, I can install the tracking code and you can then begin to see what Google thinks your site is relevant for and analyze your traffic.

If you find that your site is showing up for things it should not show up for, or not showing up when you think its should, there could be a very, very, good reason and we can then look at changing or adding to the site so that it does reflect what you want people to find it for.