Lesson video

This is unit one computing systems and networks - communication.

It is lesson three of six, selecting search results.

It would be useful, if you have completed lesson two of this unit, before you start this lesson.

If you are going to be using an internet connected device to access websites, please make sure you do so with supervision from a parent or guardian.

Hello everyone, my name is Jane Adamson and I'm your computing teacher.

I'm looking forward to teaching you a lesson.

To prepare, you will need something to write with, something to write on and an internet connected device.

Please take a moment before you start to clear away any distractions, including turning off any notifications on apps, so you can focus.

Try to find a quiet space where you can work without disruption during the lesson.

At any time during the lesson, you can pause the video.

In this lesson, you will explain, how search results are ranked, explain that search results are ordered, explain that a search engine follows rules to rank relevant pages, and suggest some of the criteria that a search engine checks to decide on the order of results.

The key vocabulary that you will be covering is ranking, search engine, search engine optimization, links and web crawlers.

Web crawlers, you may have covered web crawlers in the previous lesson, but let's find out what you already know.

You are going to answer the three questions focusing on the role of web crawlers.

How do search engines select results to display? What is the role of web crawlers? What is the search engine's index? and also how is it used? Pause the video while you take some time, to answer these questions.

Resume the video when you are ready.

How did you answer the questions? Let's go through some suggested answers.

Question one, how do search engine select the results to display? Search engines use web crawlers and use an index to display results.

Question two, what is the role of web crawlers? Well, web crawlers are types of bots that are crawling the internet to collect information from webpages.

This information is used to create an index.

Question three, what is the search engine's index and how is it used? The search engine's index is where the content from the web crawlers is stored and ordered, ready for when a search is carried out using a search engine.

Web crawlers, web crawlers gather information from the World Wide Web.

Search engines index the downloaded webpages to work out which contain the user's search terms. What web content can you find on websites? You are going to look at how webpages are structured.

Task one, create your own paper webpage.

Here is a template, take a careful look at the format.

The webpage has a number of parts, a web address, a heading, subheadings, paragraphs of information, some pictures or diagrams, and links to other websites.

Task one, create your own paper webpage, a paper version of a webpage on the theme of animals.

Use a sheet of paper, draw out a webpage.

You could use the template on the previous slide as a guide.

There is also a copy of the template in the worksheet for task one, it appears on the slide after the instructions.

Your webpage should include a web address, a heading, subheadings, paragraphs of information, some pictures or diagrams and links to other websites.

Pause the video, go to the worksheet and complete task one.

Resume once your paper based webpage is complete.

How did you get on? This is an example of a paper based webpage which has information in different sections.

It has links to other internal pages on the website and the paragraphs, as well as links to the external websites, for example, RSPCA and RSPB.

Did your example look something like this? I'm hoping it does.

Linking websites.

If you look at the BBC Bitesize webpage, you will notice it has links in the headers for Home, Daily Lessons, Learn, Support and Careers.

Now we are going to look at the BBC Bitesize website to demonstrate the features of good links on a website.

Let's explore the BBC Bitesize website.

In the header, this is the header here.

It has internal links to other parts of the BBC Bitesize website, we're on the home page here, there are Daily Lessons, Learn, Support and Careers.

It has other links at the top of the page, which go to other sites within the BBC.

For example, News and Weather.

Here's News, and here's Weather.

And we can go back, to our Bitesize site.

These demonstrate the features of good links on a website.

Did you notice that these are internal links not to external webpages? Here are two examples of paper-based websites.

You are going to decide which one to link to, but before you do that, you need to see how they rank when looking for keywords on them.

Using this scoring criteria, 30 points for a search term that is in the title, 20 points for a search term in a subheading, 10 points for a search term in the paragraph text.

calculate the scores for the two webpages.

The search terms are, dog, Labrador and black Labrador.

Let's start with the keyword dog, the first webpage has a score of 60 and the second webpage has a score of 20.

I'll explain how the answers were calculated.

Webpage one, dog appears in a subheading ones and four times in the paragraphs.

For webpage two, dog appears only twice in paragraphs.

Using the same scoring for the keyword Labrador, webpage one has a score of 80 and webpage two has a score of 90.

When you use a search term black Labrador, webpage one scores 80 points and webpage two scores 10.

But what does this scoring mean? The higher the score, the higher the webpage would appear in the results for each specific search term when using a search engine.

Which one would you link to and why? Pause for thought.

I'll tell you what I would do.

If I wanted to link to a website for Labradors, then I would pick webpage two, as that scores more highly for that search term but if I wanted to link to a webpage for dog or black Labradors, webpage one would be better.

Linking to other good websites, helps to increase the ranking of your website.

This is because search engines use the links from websites to other websites, for example, inbound links as a criteria for ranking as well.

How do search engines rank search results? Well, they use algorithms to do this.

These are complex processes that look at a number of things on websites, including links it has from and to other websites.

It gives a score for each, the website with the highest score ranks the highest.

It will appear higher up the results when you search for a keyword using the search engine.

The exact algorithms that search engines use are kept secret though.

When you rank a webpage, the scoring criteria forms part of the algorithm that a search engine uses to rank results.

Let's look at ranking a webpage by giving it a score according to the criteria.

You will use the same scoring criteria to rank your paper webpage.

We'll start with the example website about pets and score the webpage using the keyword pets.

Pets appears once in the URL, which is 20 points and once in paragraph one, so the ranking score is 21 points in total.

Now you are going to rank your paper webpage, choose your keyword and make sure you have your paper webpage to hand, go to task two on your worksheet and complete the table, use the scoring criteria to find out how high your webpage ranks.

Pause the lesson and resume once you've completed your webpage ranking.

How did you get on? Remember the sample website, has a score of 21 points.

To be honest, I'm keen to try to improve the ranking for this website, what could I do? Well, I could increase the number of times a search word appears in the paragraphs of text, I could include the search word and a heading and subheading, and if I hadn't already done it, I could include the keyword in the URL.

Reflect on what will make the biggest difference and help you to increase your page's ranking, this will help you for the next section of task two.

You will make changes to your webpage to improve its ranking.

There is an example of an improved webpage on slide six of the worksheet for task two.

When you've made your changes, calculate what your new ranking is and complete the third column in the table.

Remember to keep the search word, the keyword the same.

Pause the video and resume once you've completed your updating your task.

How did you get on? Let's go through the second version of the webpage on animals.

The keyword is pet.

I made some changes to the original webpage to try to improve its ranking.

On version one, I only had pet in the URL and once in a paragraph, after I made the changes and now have pet in the title, the subheading, and eight more times in the paragraphs on the page, what has made the biggest difference? Well having the word, the keyword in the URL makes the biggest difference, but I had that before by adding the keyword into the heading, subheading and more keywords into the paragraphs, the ranking of my webpage has improved a lot.

My new score is 44.

Hopefully, when you ranked your webpage again, after you made your changes, your ranking score improved too.

One point to note here is, one thing that you might have decided to do is simply add line upon line of the key word.

In the early years of search engines, changing the text on webpages is to include the repeated use of keywords was a tactic used to push pages up the ranking.

However, search engines have become cleverer and can now detect when writing is unnatural and features that forced use of keywords and it penalises webpages for this.

Another point to note, if someone else's website links to your website, this would increase your score as well.

We haven't mentioned the term previously, but search engine optimization, SEO is what we call the process of improving a website's ranking.

Thank you for completing this lesson and good effort.

I would love to see some photos of your work, it would be great if you could share it online.

Ask a parent or guardian permission, share it on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter tagging @OakNational and #learnwithOak.

Well done.