Maybe the best way to understand SEO and to start optimizing your website properly is to get a good understanding of how search engines operate. By now you certainly know what SEO is and how it may help your website attract more traffic. To expand that knowledge even further you will need to know the way search engines index and rank your pages.
There is a very short list of actions that search engines do in order to index a website:
Crawling
Crawling the web is the first thing search engines do. They have automated spiders that use hyperlink structure to crawl the web, pages and documents the WWW (World Wide Web) consist of.
Indexing
The second step is indexing. Once a page has been “crawled” the content of the page can be indexed. That means that the content will be stored in a giant database. This may sound easy but it is not. When you type in a specific search in a search engine you get the results in a fraction of a second, so that means that the database is highly managed.
Processing the queries
This is where the third part comes in – the queries procession. When you request information using a search engine, the engine looks up and retrieves all related data to your search. Therefore, if you typed “website optimization” into the search engine it will give you all the results matching those words. It will give you a broad result however, because it will match all of those words separately. If you were to run a search on “search engine process”, with quotes, you would find more relative results as the engine will display the results only for the matching keyword.
Ranking
Ranking is the last step and an actual result of this whole process. After the engine has found your match it will run an algorithm that will determine the ranking of your search results. The engine does that in order to give you the most relevant results for your search, so that means the first result is more likely to be relevant than the 23rd.
Closer Look at Search Engines
There are of course other aspects that go deeper into the world of search engines. You need to follow that trail in order to get the insight into the work of search engines. There are two things that a search engine counts in order to rank a page when you make a search. Those are relevance and popularity.
Relevance is actually counting. That is what it comes down to. When you run a search, the engine will go through the document and inspect it for the matching keywords. The more keywords appear on a page the more relevant the engine will find the page to be. There are other aspects to it as well, so simple keywords stuffing will not do the trick, and in fact it may turn to be lethal for your website.
Popularity is measured by citation of a document retrieved that matched the search you made. Search engines calculate the popularity by cross-referencing the content with other sites and pages pointing to it. What it comes down to is that search engines look if the search performed matches some important parts of the document, heading, titles and the body. They also perform a link analysis to see who is linking to the site and what do they say about the site, and more importantly, are they trustworthy.
This means that search engines operate on a totally different level than they did before, taking much more thing into consideration in order to figure out the relevance and popularity. The two important things search engines look is quantity and quality of links, the second one being more important. If there are thousands of links pointing to your website in the eyes of the search engines your site is popular. However, if you add trustworthy sites that link to yours, you will gain higher ranking from one such link than from hundreds of others.
Page rank
A high page rank means that the site is considered trustworthy by search engines. As mentioned before, one link from a highly ranked site can be worth thousand links from other low ranked sites. The important thing is that the page rank can be passed on.
Page ranking isn’t everything for a search engine however, since there are low ranked pages that are highly ranked in search engines’ queries. What this means is that the search engines rely on many other aspects and they are becoming even cleverer every day. The best example of this is the smart algorithm for the search engines that picks up synonyms and homonyms of a word. If you type something like “paper figures”, the search engine may give you results for origami, which is probably what you were looking for. Search engines are using their smart programs to identify synonyms for the content of the page you are searching for. That means that even though a webpage didn’t try to rank for those keywords, search engine’s algorithm will collect the data and translate it.
Search engines are evolving and algorithms are changing. No matter what kind of research you do, you will have to keep up with the ever-changing search engines’ operations in order to follow the latest trends and use them to your advantage.
Learning more about how the search engines operate is of the essence when it comes to search engine optimization process.