What is Search Engines:
A search engine is a software program that helps people find the information they are looking for online using keywords or phrases.
Search engines are able to return results quickly—even with millions of websites online—by scanning the Internet continuously and indexing every page they find.
Companies use search engine optimization (SEO) to help search engines recognize their websites as highly relevant to particular searches. Popular search engines include Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
So when we talk about search engines in this guide, we mostly mean Google. Other search engines work on similar principles and as long as your website is optimized for Google, you should be all set up for others too.
How search engines work:
The process in which search engines work the main step by steps:
- Crawling: Scour the Internet for content, looking over the code/content for each URL they find.
- Indexing: Store and organize the content found during the crawling process. Once a page is in the index, it’s in the running to be displayed as a result to relevant queries.
- Ranking: Provide the pieces of content that will best answer a searcher’s query, which means that results are ordered by most relevant to least relevant.
Crawling: Crawling is the process in which search engines scan all the internet webpages continuously. They use small pieces of programs (called crawlers or bots) to follow all the hyperlinks and discover new pages (as well as updates to the pages they discovered before).
Martin Splitt, Google Webmaster Trend Analyst, describes the crawling process quite simply
Indexing: Search engines process and store information they find in an index, a huge database of all the content they’ve discovered and deem good enough to serve up to searchers.
Ranking: Of course, search engines keep the exact calculations of their algorithms in secret. Nonetheless, many ranking factors are well-known.
Critical SEO Success Factors:
- Website speed – make sure your visitors don’t have to wait too long to load the page, otherwise, there’s a high chance they’ll leave before actually visiting it.
- Well-targeted content – you need to identify what people search for and create quality content tailored to their needs.
- Works on any device – your website must work perfectly on any device and screen size (remember that the majority of internet users come through mobile devices!).
- Crawlable website – this is a no brainer – if you want to rank, your website must be easy to find by search engines.
- Fresh content – some topics require more freshness than the others, but nonetheless, you should regularly update your content to keep it up to date.
- Quality and quantity of links – the more quality pages link to your website, the more authority you’ll have in the eyes of Google.
- Content oriented at user intent – SEO is not only about what words you use, but also about the type of content and its comprehensiveness – make your visitor happy and Google will be happy too.
- Unique content – be very careful about using duplicate content on your websites.
- EAT: Expertise, Authority, Trust – the E-A-T signals are evaluated by Google’s Quality Raters – never forget to build and prove your expertise and trustworthiness and write only about topics you are qualified for.
- Click-through rate – optimize your title tags and meta descriptions to improve the CTR of your pages.
Other important factors that may have a positive impact on your rankings:
- A well-structured page
- Content depth
- Social sharing
- Image optimization
- Use of HTTPS
- Topical authority
Google algorithm
Google’s Search Algorithm is used as an umbrella term to refer to all the individual algorithms, machine learning systems, and technologies Google uses to rank websites.
- Quality of content – the search engine tries to pick the best results in terms of quality of content.
- The relevance of pages – the page must be relevant to the search query.
- Meaning of the query – the search engine needs to understand what exactly is the user searching for.
- Usability of pages – the pages should also be usable (in terms of accessibility, readability, safety, etc.)
- Context and settings – last but not least, the user’s location, settings, and history of searches are considered the Meaning of the query.
Besides minor algorithm updates that happen on a daily basis, Google usually rolls a couple of core algorithm updates per year.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
