Jul

Understanding How Search Engines Work

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Understanding How Search Engines Work

One important fact about search engines is that they are not humans. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven to a certain extent. Search engines are only as intelligent as the computer programs that a human being developed to do the job in an automated way. Search engines are automated computer processes that crawls the Internet, indexing the web pages it encountered, processing the search query, calculating its relevancy and retrieving information.

To start, search engines crawls the web by following links from one page to another, starting with a site or page that is very popular. It indexes each page’s content, building a list of words and where these words are found. The index is a database for storing and future retrieval. Indexing is assigning the web page to a particular keyword. A weight is also assigned to the particular index entry. As this is all done by a computer program called a robot or spider, it can only do it as best as it can by analysing words and phrases in the web pages. Because Internet contents keep on changing every second, crawling and indexing is a non-stop continuous task done by the spiders.

When a site visitor searches for a particular keyword, the search engine takes on the next task of processing the search query. It compares the search string with the index database and calculates the relevancy of each of the pages that are indexed. The algorithms used for calculating relevancy differs from search engines to search engines. This explains why different search engines produce different search engine results page (SERP) for the same search query.

What role does keywords play in SEO ?

Keywords are one of the most vital SEO techniques. You optimize your site based on the keywords that you have selected. Selecting the right keywords is important. When selecting keywords, remember to consider synonyms. Why ? Because someone looking for, say, “houses” may type in “homes” or “apartments” or “flats”, etc.

Next, make your web page keyword-rich. Another aspect of keywords is the density of the keyword in the web page. The higher the density of the keyword, the better relevancy it is to the search word.

Where keywords are placed on your web page also plays a role in SEO. Keywords located in the page title, headings, and first paragraph are of higher weighting than keywords found at the bottom of the web page. Keywords in the URL also receive higher weighting.

Keywords in file and directory names are also important in SEO and should not be ignored.

How does search engines view your content and keywords ?

First of all, search engines cannot read, literally. They can only detect patterns of words and letters and do matching work as best as they can do it without actually comprehending what they are “reading”. From the patterns that they gathered, they try to figure out the content of your website and the keywords of the web page. For example if the words “search engine optimization” shows up frequently enough on a web page, that will be the keyword for the web page. Therefore, keywords are so important in your content. A word of caution is not to put too many different keywords into your web page. This may make it more confusing to the search engine spider and therefore more different for it to index your web page.

Make an effort to make the task easier for the search engine spider to accomplish their task. This may help you indirectly too.

A note about footer navigation. Because images or flash, which are not so search engine friendly, could have been used for top navigation due to aesthetic reasons, footer navigation in plain html text will allow search engines spiders to find keywords in navigation text on the web page and therefore index them.

Content is King !

The most permanent and long term SEO technique is nothing more than creating first-class content. Content is king and will always be king in the Internet world ! First-rate content should do the following :-

- add significant amount of value to your readers
- be unavailable anywhere else on the web except on your site
- be up-to-date with new information added and obsolete information discarded

Inbound links will come in by themselves once you have good content.

SEO is also sometimes called SEO copywriting because most of the techniques used actually deal with text just as copywriting is also dealing with text.

It is important to note the truth that even by following all the rules of SEO, it does not guarantee any site a high ranking. On the other hand, by not following the rules of SEO, your site may never get ranked at all.

A word about inbound links

Good quality inbound links, also called backlinks, value-add to your website and popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, all like inbound links and will index your website favorably. One of the SEO techniques used by SEO consultants is to generate inbound links for your website via methods like directory submission, link exchange, link buying, and article submission. Article submission is amongst the most effective methods of achieving a higher search ranking. Quality of links is also important. Inbound link from a popular site fares better than that from an unpopular site.