"Sociometry is the study and measurement of interpersonal relationships in a group of people." Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary

You may be wondering what sociometry has to do with search engines. Well, I intend to use the idea as a platform for discussing how people behave in a group and offer it as a way to understand how search engines operate.

Now imagine there is a summit. You are invited only if you have certain qualifications. It could be wealth, educational qualification, position held in government or business. Whatever. It may even be gender or age. Think of this attainment or possession that qualifies you for an invitation to this important summit as the theme of your website.

When you decide to honour the invitation, you leave every other engagement and assignment because you think that your attendance will do you some good. This parallels the submission of your website to the search engines.

Arriving for the submit, will you be on the high table, in any other visible position or in an obscure corner of the hall? Only the summit organisers can determine this. It would depend on how important they think you are. And they would measure your importance by their estimate of your knowledge of the subject to be discussed and how much you can contribute to the success of the summit. This approximates keywords (including key phrases) that are relevant with regard to your website.

If you were a reporter covering this submit you would probably notice that some participants enjoy a lot of handshakes at the instance of others and this is not the case for some. You would probably see that when some people extend their hand it is taken with something close to reverence and gratitude by the person to whom it was extended. Not everyone enjoys the same attention and share of conversation. As a reporter, you would be able to form an opinion based on what you observed about who the influential participants are. In search engine terms, this would be linking. What qualified these people for the monopoly of attention? How would you get links to your website?

The above discussion is only by way of an analogy and is not meant to present an exact description of how search engines review, index, rank and throw up your website when a surfer types in their search terms.