I should have started our SEO series with this post. I wanted to go back and take a look at some of the basics of search engines. It’s important to understand the basics of how search engines work and what they are looking for if we want to learn how to improve our rankings.
How Search Engines Work
The web is huge. Google estimates there are over 30 trillion individual pages on the web and that number is growing daily. Search was created to bring a level of organization to the web that allows this data to be found quickly and efficiently via a search query. To answer these queries, a search engine needs to have a huge index of data representing the web. They assemble this data by crawling and indexing the billions of pages across the web. The goal of any search engine is to make you a happy searcher by delivering the most relevant, trustworthy answer to your search query.
Crawling and Indexing
Google’s Search Index is big, over 100 million gigs big.
In order to deliver the right content to your search query, search engines need to find and index all that content. Search engines deploy tiny lines of code called bots or spiders that scour the web looking for content. Essentially they discover new content by following the links from one page to another. These bots then decipher the page content and return it to the database. The page is sorted based on the content and other factors, then stored in the database. As you can imagine these indexes are enormous. Google estimates that their index is over 100 million gigabytes.
Delivering the Goods
Once you’ve entered you query into the search box, the magic of the search engine takes over. Your query is analyzed using a series of proprietary algorithms and equations. These equations are created to attempt to flush out exactly what you are looking for. Once the search engine understands what it is you need, it begins to pull pages from the index. The results from the index are then sorted and displayed on a Search Engine Result Page or SERP. Google ranks every page on over 200 different factors. Generally speaking a Search Engine will rank your content in 2 major areas.
1. On Page Content
When crawling your page spiders scan and analyze each page of your content looking for clues about what the content on the page is about. If your content aligns with the content being searched for, your site can appear in the Search Engine Result Page.
2. Links To Content
Spiders also keep score of how many links point back to your site and whether or not those links are high or low quality. Each link back to your site is a vote for the quality of the content on your site. The more quality links your page has, the more influence or authority it has.
Putting It All Together
Once a search engine has assembled all the information and ranked it according to their factors, the results are displayed on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). We’ve already talked a little about some of the factors that go into a SERP.
If you think of a Search Engine as a huge repository of information whose only goal is to give you the answer you need, you’ll understand the basics of search engines work. Google has a pretty awesome webpage that shows you the basics of how their search engine works if you want more info. Next week we’ll take a closer look at the SERP and show where all that information comes from.
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