In my last post, I discussed how popular pages rank higher. So you might expect the Internet’s most popular pages would rank for everything. And to a certain extent this may be true, take for example Wikipedia, but the reason they don’t dominate the rankings for every search result page is that the search engines put a lot of emphasis on determining website relevance.

Relevance is the measurement of the distance between two corresponding items with regards to relationship. Luckily for Google and Microsoft, modern-day computers are quite good at these measurements, for text.

Google owns and operates well over 1 million servers. The electricity and power for those servers is most likely one of Google’s larger operating expenses. This limitation has helped shape modern search engines by putting website analysis at the forefront of search. Quite simply, it takes less computing power and is much simpler programmatically to determine relevancy between texts than it is between an image and video. This is the reason that text results are so much more prominent in the search results than videos or images.

So what does this mean for me? To me, it indicates that my time, at this moment is better spent optimizing text versus images or videos. This strategy will likely have to change in the future, as computers get more powerful and energy-efficient, but for right now text should be every SEO’s primary focus.

The most basic function a website could take would be a blank page. Unfortunately for the search engines, top level domain names, domain owners, code validation and copyright dates don’t help much in determining relevance. This means your page needs content before its able rank in the search engines.

The search engines have to use their analysis of content as their primary indication of relevance for determining ranking for a given search. For SEO’s, this means the content on a given pages can be manipulated to help increase ranking for a particular search query.

In the old days of AltaVista and other search engines, SEO’s would just need to write the keyword 100 times on their site to make it rank #1 for that search term. What could be more relevant for the search term then a page that says your main keyword 100 times? Of course the problem was that clever SEO’s realized the answer was a page that has the search term 101 times. This metric, called keyword density was quickly manipulated, and the search engines of the time diluted the power of this metric on rankings until it became almost useless, similar to what has happened to the keywords meta-tag and H1 tag.