Mirror, Mirror on the wall, what’s the most popular site of all?

Mirror, Mirror on the wall, what’s the most popular site of all?

 by Ephraim Gadsby

Have you ever wondered how a search engine determines how to rank a web site.  Well, it is a mystery to most everyone except the developers of search engines.  Those developers (magic mirrors) have the answers but they are not saying, at least not directly.  There are many factors apparently that determine the rank of a website and the rules change monthly as the “magic mirrors” learn more about the search users social behaviors.

I was recently talking with a friend of mine that is employed as a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Consultant.  I learned of a number of quick and useful tools to evaluate the overall popularity of a website.  One of the best indicators for measuring the popularity of a website is the number of links to that website from other websites. 

So why is this important?  Given that the Internet is more popular than most any other media (possibly with the exception of TV, if advertising dollars are any indication), most any supplier to the laboratory industry needs to make sure that they are reaching their customer base in the most effective way. 

There are some useful tools to evaluate the popularity of your website.  The following table ranks the listed websites by the number of links to those websites as determined by Google.com (the largest and most popular search engine).  You might want to test your sites popularity: 

Polls clearly show that the Internet is by far, the most important and widely used tool to find products, services and information of all types.  The Internet is used by professionals and by consumers of all walks of life.  This would include the laboratory professional.

The Internet is the ultimate communications tool that serves the marketer and the consumer equally.  However, like with all things in life, if you want to make it work for you, you will have to work for it, by making your site more popular by giving your readers what they want, useful information.  The sites above give a pretty good representation of their relative popularity on the Internet.