A while back a friend of mine contacted me with some questions about search engines. She had recently been involved in launching a web site for an existing bricks and mortar company that never had an internet presence in the past. The only signs of there company online were a few lukewarm Yelp ratings. She was new to search engines and was wondering why they didn’t show up at the top of Google search results immediately after the site launched. She also wondered why the site’s description on Google mentioned that it was under construction, while that text no longer appeared anyplace on their site. I responded by typing up my 1,000 foot overview of search engine optimization and I thought I should also share it in this blog post:

Hi [ name withheld to protect the innocent :) ],

Unfortunately there isn’t a person you can call to change your search engine rankings. Rankings against different keywords come from a variety of factors:

Keyword uniqueness and density: The word “business” has 2,930,000,000 results on Google while “Mark Celsor” only has 2,310. I can create a web site that repeatedly talks about “Mark Celsor” and it will be much easier to have the top result than if I created a page about “business”.

Authority of web site: This is a combination of the age of the web site and the number of other sites that link to it. Yelp is a very popular and well established web site, so many people link to it and search engines consider it to have a high level of authority. A small web site that was launched last week with very few other sites linking to it would not have much authority in Google’s eyes.

There are also hundreds of smaller subtle factors that influence rankings.The process of tweaking these factors and the quest to get higher search engine results is a huge business. In 2008 over $13.5 billion were spent on search engine marketing and optimization. In the 1990s it was possible to just buy top search results from the search engines but Google changed the game by focusing on providing organic results based on authority. It is still possible to buy advertising space on the margins of Google search results for particular keywords but you can not pay them to directly modify the actual results. Google’s minimum for these types of ads is around $50 per month and you essentially bid against other people for ad placement. As a point of reference, during the presidential campaign the candidates were spending around $100,000 per day on these little Google ads.

In reference to the “Under Construction” message that you see on the search results. This will eventually go away. Google picked that text up from the site during the time before the real site was built. Eventually Google will index the pages of the site again and replace the message with real content. The frequency at which Google indexes different sites is tied to the site’s authority and how frequently the site’s content changes.

I hope this helps build a better picture of how search results work. For the short term I would recommend getting real happy customers to write positive reviews on Yelp and other sites. Keep in mind that fake super positive reviews on sites like Yelp are quickly identified and can create backlashes, so be careful and authentic. Also make sure that your listings on all these sites include a link to your web site address to build authority.