How Search Engines Work
An astonishing number of people go to their favorite search engine every minute of every day and type in words related to what they are looking for. If a searcher types words into a search engine that relate to your products or service, are you able to be found?
Having the pages in your website come up on the first page for a search query is very powerful. Studies show that searchers won’t go past the first two pages of search returns before they give up or search for something else.Traffic your site sees from search engine queries is called ‘organic traffic’. This traffic is free. Yes, free advertising and free business IF your website is optimized properly and DOES come up early enough in the search engines.
Optimizing your site to rank higher in the search engines is called Search Engine Optimization; also referred to as SEO.
In order to learn how to properly optimize a website for the search engines, we must take a quick glimpse at how search engines work.
How Search Engines Work
For the casual internet user, how a search engine works has probably never crossed their mind. They type in the words relating to the information they want to find and presto, it is returned to them. The searcher than scrolls thru the results and clicks on pages that appear to match what they are looking for.
How do search engines, like Google, do this? How does Google decide which pages are more relevant to a search term than other web pages?
Google sends out countless numbers of robot-type programs that are constantly scanning the internet for new or updated content. These crawling programs are also referred to as ’spiders’ or ‘bots’. These search engine crawlers focus and take ‘notes’ on certain elements of a web page such as:
- The title of the web page and name of the website
- The words that are used IN the title and name of a website
- Words within the content of a webpage
- Words that are assigned in the <meta> tags of a website
- The links, and the the words used to link, that are found on that web page, and
- The words OTHERS use when linking to YOUR web page.
This is far from a complete list of over 200+ factors search engines, like Google, take into account when deciding where a web page will rank in the search engine for a certain search query. All of these factors are combined into an algorithm that end up determining how well your web site will, or won’t do in the search engines. This algorithm is ever-changing as the marketplace changes, the needs of users change, and as the web develops.
A professional SEO will be up-to-date on our industry standards and will be best able to optimize the pages on your website to encourage the search engines to rank your site higher.
