With the task of improving the search ranking of a website at hand, an SEO professional usually asks, “How do I rank this site?”

An equally important question that they must also ask is, “How do search engines rank pages or sites?”

Why do search engines rank web pages?

You may wonder why a search engine would use all those resources to rank pages against the queries it gets from you. After all, it would be easier and cheaper to only show a list of search results sorted by word count, freshness, or any other parameters.

The answer to this question is simple – you are not going to use a search engine that doesn’t have any ranking system in place.

So when you have the task of ranking a page, you need to keep in mind that the user you are trying to reach is not yours. You are loaning that user from search engines. That is why it is essential to adhere to the rules set by search engines.

That said, now we are going to talk about the steps involved in the ranking a web pages at the search engine’s end.

1. Classification

First, the search engine has to classify the query that comes in. All of the following steps that the search engine has to perform depend on this step. This classification involves the search engine attaching several labels to a query. Those labels may include:

• YMYL
• Local
• Unseen
• Question

1. Context

The second step in the ranking process is the context assignment. The search engine uses any relevant information it has about the query that the user is entering. For instance, you may have checked the weather on Google quite several times. You might remember that you only had to enter the word “weather” and Google displayed the weather of your locality only. It didn’t show you the weather of a different locality in a different part of the country or world. That is what assignment of a context to a search query is.

1. Weights

You may have heard a lot about RankBrain. This core algorithm allows Google to add weightage to the search queries it receives from users. A query can have more than one signal. That’s where it becomes essential for the engine to add weightage to the strongest of signals, and that’s where RankBrain comes into play. RankBrain is a machine learning system that perfects itself while doing what it does. It can learn from the previous search results created throughout its active time. It means that it is getting smarter every day in adding weightage to search queries.

1. Layout

The layout of a result page may change with the change of query. Search engines are smart enough to identify the intent behind a search query. They identify what particular layout suits well to a result page. With the search engine working on so many signals and applying too many parameters to apply weightage to a query, identifying which layout shows up is like hitting a moving target.

1. Ranking

Although ranking is the final and most sought after step, it is the easiest one in this entire process. It has to put together results from the process mentioned above and arrange ten blue links on one page.