While the exact methods that Google, Bing and Yahoo use to index websites are closely guarded secrets, the concept is simple, they want to find the most relevant page for whatever a user is searching for.

How do they that?

When Google searches its database of indexed pages it starts by looking for pages that contain the exact phrase. After this it looks through pages containing the word close together, after that it looks for pages that have the words scattered around. But this isn’t necessarily the order that the search engines will display the results; in some cases you’ll find pages with the words close together (not the exact phrase) appear higher in the results. This is because the search engines evaluate pages using a variety of criteria.

Same keyword different value.

The search engines assess many factors. They look for the words throughout the page, including the underlying code that’s not visible to users. Each time they find the words, they are scored in some way. So a word in one position can be worth more than the same word in another position. A word formatted one way is worth more than a word formatted another way.

Links to your web page.

Along with this the search engines also look at the links that are pointing to pages, it also evaluates these referencing pages: How popular are the pages? How many other links come from this page? What words are in the link text?

Use your keywords.

Say for example you search for accidental damage claim, and the search engine finds two pages, one page has that term as the page title (between the <title></title> tags), while the other has the term buried deep down in page text. Which one would you think best matches the search term? If the page is titled “accidental damage claim” that should indicate that the whole page is related to that term. In the other page the term is way down the page, it could be that this page is only loosely related to the term.

So if the keywords are in the links that point to the page, the page must be relevant to those keywords, if the keywords are also in the headings that must mean something; if the keywords are frequently used throughout the page, rather than just once or twice that must signify something.

Originally search engines were academic research tools designed to find text information. Search engines largely index text, or content – so make it easy for the search engines to know what your web page is about.