How Search Engines Works for a Website?
Congratulations on getting a website for your business or organisation! Now let us talk about how people can search for you or your product effortlessly via search engines. But first, what are search engines? How Search Engines Works for a Website?
They are simply response machines – that respond to whatever content that is being searched for on the internet, that is, if your website would show up on search results, it must have the content been searched for on any search engines. How then do these contents appear in the search results? In order to answer this, it would be a good idea to have a glimpse of how this summarily works behind-the-scenes and in all fairness; you deserve to know how they function to better understand how to optimise them for your website.
First, you should know that search engines primarily operate a 3-step CIR approach known as Crawling, Index and Ranking. When the search engine sends out a team of software programs or robots typically known as (web) crawlers, spiders or bots to collect content (which could be webpage, images, text, videos, etc) on the World Wide Web; it request these contents as links which sometimes leads to other links from new web pages as web contents are constantly updated, it downloads and make copies of them, this process is what is called Crawling.
Then if you have ever thought about how rapid and precise you retrieve your search query from search engine like Google, this is simply due to a process that allows for collection and storage of the data diligently gotten by the web crawlers, in other words, when you search for anything on Google for example, the search results you see displayed are technically ‘offline’ content already saved from the crawlers pre-activities. The course of organising these web pages and data that aids the rapid response to your query from the search engine is what we call Indexing while that ‘storeroom’ that houses the web pages and data copied from the crawling process is the Index. Now play out this scenario: an index of 10,000 documents for example can be queried via your search engines to reveal results within micro-milliseconds but to sequentially scan that same amount of documents could take some infinite hours to retrieve! So when next you hear the word ‘web indexing’, no ambiguity is intended, simply see it as a type of optimisation- Performance Bridge between your query on your search engines and your search results.
With thousands of documents on the index, how then do our search results appear in the order in which we see them on search engines like Google? It is simple Ranking. When your search engine receives a query, an algorithm is used to scan through all the pages retrieved from the index to select what it considers the most relevant of them, hence ranks these pages in that order. There are hundreds of factors that influence this ranking and cause you to see your search results the way they appear on your search engine. Although, each of these factors vary in value, one of the most common of them is the content of the page and this is where the knowledge of SEO come to play. Therefore, Keywords optimization for organic traffic plays an important role here and SEO Link Building (Digital Marketing) is the most precious part.
Now that you have a glimpse into the background scene of how search engine works for your website, hope you start looking for how best to optimise your website to get the attention of any search engine.
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