Search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask being the more important ones) are your means to your clients. In an age when people are empowered to find so much information related to a purchase online you canot afford not to come up in the search results.
So how is it that these almighty search engines do their computations to figure out who should come up in their results? The short answer is – No one really knows. But the truth is we have some good ideas about which factors are important to search engines based on what we know about their algorithms. Search engines run automated programs called “spiders” to metaphorically “crawl” websites. This is a term you will hear often when referring to search engines. Basically it means that the programs will follow all the links in your pages starting from your home homepage to find other pages in your site and to extract the content from each page. To extract the content or meaning from your pages, SE’s will use the text that is on your pages, as well as information about your page that resides within your code (your meta tags, page titles), as well as external factors such as how many people are linking to your web pages. The SE then creates an index of the pages in your website in their records, along with the billions of other pages it has crawled in the world wide web. When a user submits a search request, the SE will sort and search through the billions of records it has in its index quickly to extract the results that it will display to you.
When processing a request a search engine will extract all the pages that match the search term. For example, if you enter family summer vacations into Google you will receive over 10.5 million results. If you enter “family summer vacations” with the apostrophes, Google will display 6,280 results. In the second scenario, with the apostrophes, Google extracts only pages that match the exact term with the three words in the same order; in the first it extracts all records that have any of these words in any order, including plural and singular versions.
When a request is submitted to a search engine (that is, when you type words into the search box of a search engine and press enter), it first extracts all the pages that match the search term and then it ranks them and sorts them in an order that lists the most relevant pages first. The search engine’s algorithm does this calculation and although the algorithm is constantly changing we have a good idea of what factors are considered in the ranking.
So as you see, SE’s are complex mechanisms but the good news is that you don’t really need to know the ins and outs of how they do their processing. Continually optimizing your site to allow search engines to extract your content, and writing quality, relevant content are the first steps to improving your organic traffic.
Tags: search engines, SEO
