Untangling the Web - Part 2
Written by: William Knelsen
Introduction
This is the second article in a series of articles featured in the iWinkler magazine about the World Wide Web and how websites work. If you have always wondered how the internet started, what happens behind the scenes of a website and how to make the most out of your website, you will find value in reading this series.
Search Engines
A search engine accesses information on your website by sending “Robots” to crawl through the internet and retrieve data. These robots decide what information to collect based on how important the information is on each page. If a particular word or phrase is found to be the “main point” of the page, it is included in the search engine’s index.
Although this is how a search engine collects information, a totally different method is used to determine the placement of your website data in a search query. Google has a tool they call PageRank™, which is a system for ranking web pages based on the popularity of the page’s content on the web. Basically, every link on the internet is seen as a “vote” by Google. The more votes your site has, the higher in the rankings it will be. Another aspect to this is the popularity of the sites that are linking to your site. A popular website will have a more powerful vote, thus making your website more popular. You know that saying, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? Well, in the case of a search engine, “It's what you know, and who you know” that is important.
Return on Investment
A good investor will never put money into something if there will be no return. Websites should always make your company more successful, all it takes is a little effort (and some professional advice)!
One thing that is important when building a website is to keep in mind that your company information is available to the entire world, and there is no limit to the different configuration of devices used or demographics viewing your site. In our own research, we have discovered that people will use whatever configuration they are comfortable with and if the website they are visiting doesn’t cater to their configuration, they will simply move on to a different website with similar information. It is absolutely crucial, if you want to get the best ROI from your website, to meet the requirements of the largest spread of configurations possible. Doing this will give you an advantage over competitors who may have an inaccessible website because of the device the visitor is using to view the Web.
Another really important aspect to a getting the best ROI possible has to do with what we mentioned above: Search Engines! It can’t be stressed enough how important it is to make your website accessible to search engines. If you spend thousands of dollars on an ad, you would expect it to be visible for all to see, not placed in the woods somewhere, or hidden in the middle of a magazine. The same is true for a website. Many people are under the impression that simply putting up a website is effort enough. Sorry to disappoint you, but your website will not jump onto people’s screens, they must find it to see it. If your website is somewhere in the woods, you need to put up signs so people know where to go to see it. On the Web, these ‘signs’ are search result placements.
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