Your site needs optimization! Search Engines have made it very easy to find what you are looking for on the Internet, but how is it that they provide you with the results you are searching for? Finding information is extremely simple. Most browsers now have search boxes built into their interfaces that allow you to select many different search engines from a list. All you have to do is, choose an engine, type in what you are looking for and click the little magnifying lens.
Almost instantly, you are shown a list of links to pages containing the terms you are searching for, but how does your favorite search engine find the web pages you are looking for and how does it determine the order and relevance of the delivered results ? Basically, a search engine is a software program that searches for sites based on the words that you designate as search terms. You type in your search terms. Next, the search engine software quickly sorts through literally millions of pages in its database to find matches to this query. Lastly, the search engine’s results are ranked in order of relevancy.
Almost every search engine uses this basic process when conducting search processes, but don’t expect the same results from different search engines. Differences in search engines are bound to deliver different results depending on which engine you use.
There are three key processes involved before you search results are delivered to you:
- Spider, Robot, bot and Crawler: These are all names for a program that follows, or “crawls”, hyperlinks throughout the Internet, grabbing content from new and updated sites and adding it to search engine indexes. Spiders only can follow links from one page to another and from one site to another. That is the primary reason why inbound links to your site are so important.Links to your website from other websites will give the search engine spiders more paths with which to find your content, and also increase the ranking of your page in search results.
- Indexing: This step involves the conversion of the enormous amount of data obtained by the spider, bot or crawler into a format that is more easily searchable for the search engine software. Search engine spiders process each of the pages they crawl in order to compile a giant index of all the words they see and their locations on each crawled page. Search engines also process the information located in each web page’s key words, content and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT image attributes.
- Serving results: There are a few factors that are crucial to the result serving process. The first one is relevance. Relevance is how closely the contents of documents returned by a search match the searcher’s query. If the searcher’s query terms show up multiple times in a document, particularly in important parts of the document such as the title and/or top of the document, the document is judged to be very relevant to the query. This process is known as document analysis. Most modern search engines check key areas of web pages, like the title, the meta data, and the content within the tags, to see how closely they match the search query. The second factor is popularity. Search engines measure who is linking to a site or page, how many incoming links the site or page has from outside sources, and even what these outside sources are saying about that site or page. Each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s popularity. Search engines must also take into consideration how much they can trust their sources.
Link and document analysis techniques examine literally hundreds of factors that go through the search engine algorithms to determine in what order results should be presented to the searcher.
