In this article, we will explore how search engines work and will help your business use SEO to reach potential customers.
What Is a Search Engine?
A search engine is a software that allows users to search for content based on keywords on the internet. Although you can use many search engines, only a few are popular, with Google at the top. When a user enters a query in the search bar, a search engine results page (SERP) is returned. A SERP uses unique algorithms to look for the results in its database, ranking the found pages according to their relevance. Each search engine uses a different algorithm (the programs that rank the results), so ranking may vary across various search engines.
A search engine frequently changes its algorithm to improve user experience. They aim to provide users with the best, most relevant results by understanding how they search.
Simply put, a search engine prioritizes the highest quality and most relevant pages.
How Do Search Engines Work?
There are mainly three steps to how search engines work:
Crawling
The discovery of web pages starts with the process called crawling. Search engines use small programs called bots, spider bots, and sometimes web crawlers to scour the internet. They follow links from old web pages to the new ones that need to be discovered. They also do this so content can be updated once they crawl your website again.
Indexing
Once the spider bots crawl a web page, it’s time for indexing. A search engine validates and stores the content of a web page in its database based on keywords. Your website has to be indexed to display on the SERP; following SEO best practices can help your website rank for the correct search queries.
Remember that crawling and indexing are continuous processes that occur repeatedly to keep the database current.
Ranking
The last step is picking the best results and creating a list of web pages on the SERP. The goal of search engines is to provide the user with the most relevant results.
Every search engine uses numerous ranking signals, including keyword density, speed links, etc. Most of the factors are kept a secret and unavailable to the public.
Besides providing helpful information for users, most search engines offer tips to improve your web page ranking. The exact algorithms used are kept private and changed frequently to avoid misuse. But by implementing SEO best practices, you can be sure that:
- Search engines can easily crawl your website. You can also request them to crawl new content.
- Your content is indexed for the right keywords to appear for relevant searches.
- SEO can help your content rank highly.
Directory Search Engines
Humans power directory search engines. In other words, a human being finds and maintains web content. These search engines work as directories for specific types of content. It means that they only show results for content that is manually added. For example, Yahoo used only to search a directory of submitted pages. They do not crawl the internet. You can still use SEO strategies to rank highly for relevant queries within these directory search engines.
Rich Media Search Results
Universal or blended search is how a search engine displays various content types in the SERP. The SERP displays visuals such as images, videos, and the traditional text page results. For example, searching for hot chocolate recipes, you can see the featured images at the top. Rich media search results can also be tagged with news, articles, maps, shops, books, etc.
Various types of content on your website could impact your chances of appearing on SERP and how highly you are ranked. You can add blogs and videos to give customers details on using your products.
You can also add some code to the HTML markup called structured data to help search engines understand and display specific types of content. It also helps to attract organic traffic. Structured data includes product names, pricing, ratings, addresses, and contact numbers that can appear on the SERP.
