Ranking Web Pages Unlike a librarian, search engines do not have the ability to ask questions to focus the search. They also can't rely on judgement and experience to rank Web pages. Search engines follow a set of rules, involving the location and frequency of keywords on a Web page. Pages with keywords appearing in the title are assumed to be more relevant to the topic. Similarly, keywords appearing near the top of a Web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text, are assumed to be important and, hence, are mentioned right in the beginning.
Frequency is the other major factor in how search engines determine relevancy.
A search engine will analyse how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a Web page. But no two search engines produce the same results. This is primarily because some search engines index more Web pages then others. For example, Excite uses link popularity as part of its linking method. It can tell which of the pages in its index have a lot of links pointing at them.