While you should always write content for your consumers rather than search engines, it’s crucial to know how search engine works. Once you’ve figured out what the search engine is looking for, you can move on to the next stage, which is incorporating the aspects that the search engine is seeking for.
WHAT IS A SEARCH ENGINE?
A search engine is a programme that searches its own database for a certain item in order to display results that match the user’s query. Inside their own database, search engines use their own algorithm to retrieve results that match the query.
Search engines are response machines. They exist to find, understand, and categorize content on the internet in order to provide the most appropriate answers to searchers’ requests. Your content must first be visible to search engines in order to appear in search results.
Using their own web crawlers, search engines crawl through hundreds of billions of pages. Search engine bots or spiders are the most prevalent names for these web crawlers. A search engine navigates the internet by downloading web pages and then following links on those sites to find new pages that have become available.
Understanding how search engines crawl, index, and rank content will help you rank your website for relevant and popular keywords in organic search results. You’ll gain more clicks and organic traffic to your content if you can rank high for these searches.
Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo are few examples of search engines.
HOW SEARCH ENGINE WORKS?
Search engines essentially work in these 4 stages:
1) CRAWLING:
Search engines must first find your web pages before they can serve them to you. When you enter a search query into a search engine, web crawlers, also known as bots or spiders, crawl thousands, if not millions, of pages in its index, select the ones that are most relevant (depending on a variety of parameters), and return a result. This implies their bots examine them to determine what they are about. They look at the written and unwritten information, as well as the visual appearance and overall layout.
2) INDEXING:
The process of examining a page and storing and categorizing it is known as indexing. The relevant information is indexed after a page is found and crawled. Google examines the page’s content, images, and video files to determine what the page is about. However, not all crawled data is useful; just because a page is discovered and crawled does not ensure it will be indexed.
3) CALCULATING RELEVANCY:
Finally, search engines analyze through indexed data to deliver the most relevant results for each query. They do it using search algorithms, which are techniques that assess what a searcher is looking for and determine which results are the most relevant. The quality of the pages in an algorithm’s index is determined by a variety of factors.
4) RETRIEVING RESULTS:
To rank relevant results, Google employs a number of algorithms. Many of the ranking elements used in these algorithms look at a piece of content’s overall popularity as well as the qualitative experience people have when they arrive on the page.
Backlink quality, mobile-friendliness, and freshness, or how recently information was updated are some of these characteristics. To ensure that the algorithms are performing as intended, Google uses human Search Quality Raters to test and modify them. This is one of the few situations when humans, rather than computers, are involved in the operation of search engines.
WRAPPING UP:
Understanding how search engines work is the first step toward improving your Google ranking and increasing your traffic. Your site is essentially useless if search engines can’t find, crawl, and index your sites.
