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Abstract:
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Since the explosion of the Internet age the need of search online information
has grown as well at the light velocity. As a consequent, new marketing
disciplines arise in the digital world. This thesis describes, in the search engine
marketing framework, how the ranking in the search engine results page
(SERP) can be influenced.
Wikipedia describes search engine marketing or SEM as a form of Internet
marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search
engine result pages (SERPs). Therefore, the importance of being searchable
and visible to the users reveal needs of improvement for the website designers.
Different factors are used to produce search rankings. One of them is
PageRank. The present thesis focuses on how PageRank of Google makes use
of the linking structure of the Web in order to maximise relevance of the results
in a web search. PageRank used to be the jigsaw of webmasters because of
the secrecy it used to have.
The formula that lies behind PageRank enabled the founders of Google to
convert a PhD into one of the most successful companies ever. The uniqueness
of PageRank in contrast to other Web Search Engines consist in providing the
user with the greatest relevance of the results for a specific query, thus
providing the most satisfactory user experience.
Google does use PageRank as part of their ranking formula. Although it is not
as important as many believe, it is nevertheless a measure of a web page’s
popularity, and gives a certain indication on how “important” Google considers a
page to be.
The goal of search marketing is being visible to the end user. Two different
fields within search marketing can be pointed out: Search Engine Optimisation
and search engine marketing. This study focuses on the first one, Search
Engine Optimisation, which refers to all types of initiatives and actions taken by
website designers in order to increase the relevance for the Search Engines. It
is about design, optimising content, linking structure (internal and external) and
other page specific factors.
Because of the predominance of Google, this thesis looks at which steps can be
taken in a certain website when trying to be optimized for Google’s algorithm
PageRank. Moreover, other factors which also have an influence are analyzed. |
