Secrets of successful websites

Sites and search engines


Websites are collections of electronic pages, aka web pages, and are the natural outcome of the development of the world wide web which first saw the light of day in the early nineties.  The internet (which has erroneously become identified with the world wide web) had been around for thirty years before that and was just a collection of web pages with no structure or organisation.  

The world wide web introduced links or hyper-links for the first time, links that took people from one page to another without first logging out of the original page and then logging in to the new page.  These links were soon forming navigation aids for groups of pages and it is these groups of pages that people starting calling "websites".  The use of links has, of course, moved on and websites can now be linked to each other as well as pages within.

The economic value of websites was soon realised and their use expanded exponentially.  To help visitors to the world wide web search engines were developed.  Searchers would type in what they were looking for and the search engines would then look at the indexes they had built to see what sites had the relevant keywords and then display them randomly.  The limitation of this approach was that lists of search results would be haphazard;  searching for "Spanish holidays" would get a random list of sites with those words in their keyword metatags and in no order.  A bucket-shop which had just opened for business could be top and Thomas Cook might be on page three.

Then along came Google with its determination to rank sites according to their usefulness to the searcher.  Google ignored keywords in metatags because they had been so discredited through abuse and introduced PageRank.  Essentially this notes all the votes for a site by counting the number of sites that link to it (one link, one vote) and always put the site with most votes at the top of the list.

Nowadays Google is much more sophisticated than even that.  It indexes every word on every page and then measures the relevancy of a site to what the searcher is seeking as well as numerous other checks on top of its original voting system.
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