Back to Search Engine Basics: Determining Relevance and Popularity

Back to Search Engine Basics: Determining Relevance and Popularity

published by Dan in SEO Basics with 2 Comments

This blog and thousands out there are dedicated to search engine optimisation. In time for holidays I decided to take a little breather and instead of talking about the latest in SEO will look back and simply discuss the basics.

Search engines rely on the science of information retrieval, which in turn depend on two very critical factors for getting search results – relevance and popularity.

Relevance – The relevance of search results is very important since it determines whether the returned results will be of any use to the user. It also determines the degree of usefulness. The more relevant the search results are, the better. To determine relevance search engines rely on the frequency of the appearance of search terms in a web page. This is the reason why keywords are an important aspect of SEO. Keyword optimisation exists for a reason – to help search engines determine if the web page is relevant to a certain search term. By using certain keywords in more prominent places like page titles, subheaders, etc. the keywords are given more emphasis indicating that the content of that page is indeed very relevant to that topic.

Popularity – Popularity is important because it gives a measure of how many users find the contents of a web page useful. It lends credibility to a website. To determine a sites popularity search engines look for other web pages/sites that reference a certain site. In SEO terms the search engines counts the number of inbound links. This is the reason why, like keyword optimisation, link building is a very important SEO strategy.

Popularity: 21% [?]

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2 responses to Back to Search Engine Basics: Determining Relevance and Popularity