Search Engine Web Page Ranking
Why the Search Engines Sometimes Rank the Wrong Page from a Website
Jan 22, 2009
Website owners who spend a lot of time and effort developing their site and carefully designing and targeting each web page for their customers can be surprised when a search engine decides to rank the ‘wrong’ page higher than the preferred page.
Pages from the same site are usually ranked independently, leading to frustration when website owners believe that a lower ranked page is more appropriate for their customers. Understanding page ranking is an essential part of search engine optimisation.
Search Engine Ranking and Optimisation
Search engines all use different criteria to judge how high up the search results a page will be displayed and this is known as the page ranking.
A key point to understand is that each search engine will decide how useful and relevant each page is to that search engine’s customers – the searchers, users and website readers (not the website owners). The search engines review websites and decide where each page will be ranked and displayed depending on what the searchers are looking for.
Relevance is critical. The more relevant a page to the searcher, the higher ranked it will be.
How to Improve a Page's Search Engine Ranking
If the wrong page from a website has been ranked more highly than another, then there are a number of actions that can be taken to help solve the problem.
Here are a few of the most straightforward.
- Make sure the basics are right to ensure a good web page ranking. This means “Creating compelling and useful content” as explained in Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide
- Carefully check the differences between the two pages to determine in what ways the wrong page could actually be more relevant to search engine users. Consider which page is most interesting to a searcher. Does it answer a question? Are the words and phrases the searcher entered used on the page or not? Change the preferred page to be more relevant.
- Check that the page title is relevant and describes what is on the page. The page title is shown along the very top of most browser windows. The title is important as it is also displayed by the search engines when the search results are listed for a user.
- Compare other pages from other websites ranking above or near to the wrong page, work out what they all have in common and then make changes to the preferred page. For example, perhaps every other page mentions the same solution to a problem.
It can take a while for changes to yield results in terms of improved search engine webpage rankings. It can also take a while for new pages to be ranked by the search engines, so if the wrong page is ranked higher than expected, review the items above and then wait for the results.
 |
