Average Joe's Guide To How A Search Engine Works
Like most people I had no idea how a search engine worked
, all I knew was that if I wanted to know something, Mr Google would point me to someone who could tell me the answer. Why did one website come up ahead of another one in a search? How did Mr Google work out which website was most relevant to what I was looking for? The mechanics behind Search Engine Optimization were a complete mystery until someone took the time to explain it to me in practical terms (hey I was the kid that thought faxes ran on conveyer belts under the city until mum set me straight!)
The truth is, it's complicated, but thankfully there are organizations out there who live and breathe Search Engine Optimization and can decipher the complex rules for us. Nobody knows the full Google Algorithm, and they would probably have to kill you if they told you!! In saying this, there are things that lie fully within your control that will greatly help to increase your website's ranking - or popularity and therefore the likelihood that people will find my site when they use a search engine.
So, here's the short version of how it works.
The Internet can be likened to a large filing cabinet, inside this cabinet there are many shelves, each of these shelves are packed with folders and each of these have thousands of pages, which of course contain millions of words and images. Some of these words are important in describing your website's message. They are called Keywords, meta tags, ALT tags, H1 tags etc.
Search engines sift through all of these to determine which pages will be relevant to the person submitting the search query. To do that, they need to know what to search for - so they "index" the content.
The process of indexing is fascinating, it involves "spiders", "bots" and "crawlers" sifting through all of the shelves, folders and pages in that big cabinet looking for "spider food" (which is really just targets that the search engines have set as things of interest such as links to/from other authoritative pages and keywords) the pages that have been crawled on, so long as they have sufficient information to be filed into a group of sorts are "indexed".
Indexing can be likened to an inventory list of which word is found in which file, in which folder, on which shelf and so forth.
When anyone types a word into the search engine, the indexed pages with the relevant keywords will be shown, in rank order. Basically the more relevant, authoritative and content rich your website it, the more it will be known to the search engine, hence its more likely that you are to come up in the early searches.
Help searchers to find you by making sure there is something they can find!
Your website content is such an important part of who you are as a business - it represents you personally and tells your story. Keywords tell your story in a few concise phrases and are critical for search engines to pull your site up in relevant searches.
More than 50% of pages on the internet are not indexed by search engines because there are no keywords, no meta tags (descriptions on pages), no ALT tags (descriptions attached to images), badly formed HTML, poor site navigation, no sitemap and some even have pages titled "untitled document". How are search engines supposed to know that your site should be included in which search results? Who do you know that has ever searched for "untitled document'?
So let's give you an example of how this all works, someone in outer Mongolia types into their preferred search engine "widget sellers in Te Awamutu" and Google sends its spiders off and first checks out the filing cabinet - this is the server - the spider bots check out if you have previously been indexed - then it checks out the folder - this is your website - then it checks out the files in that folder - pages, links and images on your site. Each time it encounters certain "positive factors" such as, "Widget sellers, Te Awamutu" it adds another 'point' to your ranking, so consequently you will be higher on the search results than the man next door who has no keywords or targeted content.
This is of course a very simplified explanation of how page ranks are determined but search engine optimization is quite a subject to blog about.
So now you know the secret - get out there and start looking at your site and its content - it is not going to write itself, and unless you want to represent all your hard work as "untitled document" you need to get busy.
Next on your agenda should be tapping into the plethora of online help out there - just ask Google or lookup comet seo.
by: Manas Kumar
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