March 2007
Search Engine Basics: The secrets of how search engines work!
One of the most popular questions from our clients and website owners in general seems to be, "How do I get my site to be found on Google?" They know it's important to appear in search engine results but they just don't know why it doesn't happen to them.
In can be very easy to become discouraged or puzzled by the complexity of it all. With search engines changing the way they factor the results on such a frequent basis it can seem overwhelming to keep up with it all, but we would like to help de-mystify some of the basic functions of how search engines work and hopefully allow you to come away with a better understanding!
The big secret
You’re probably wondering why we want to give away our precious secrets, but the truth is that there are no secrets! It's true: the 'big secret' of search engine optimization is that there is not one rule or technique that will send your site soaring to the top of the engines. Rather, a well organized site with relevant content that is consistently growing, stands the best chance to make it to the top, and stay there.
It is all about understanding what is going on, followed by the hard work and attention to detail that are common to many business activities.
The three primary functions of a search engine
For simplicity's sake, let's say there are three pieces of software that together make up a search engine - the Spider software, the Index software and the Query software.
If you understand what these three do, then you have the foundation for getting your website to the top of the search engines.
The Spider software 'crawls’ the web looking for new pages to collect and add to the search engine databases.
This is a metaphor. In reality, the spider doesn't do any 'crawling' and doesn't 'visit' any web pages. It requests pages from a website in the same way as Internet Explorer, or Firefox or whatever browser you use to request pages to display on your screen.
The difference is that the spider doesn't collect images or formatting - it is only interested in text and links AND the URL, (for example, http://www.Unique-Resource-Locator.html) from which they come: it doesn't display anything and it gets as much information as it can in the shortest time possible.
A spider loves links because they lead it to other web pages that have the things that it loves, guess what? Text, links and URLs!
The Index software catches everything the Spider can throw at it (yes, that's another metaphor). The index makes sense of the mass of text, links and URLs using what is called an algorithm - a complex mathematical formula that indexes the words, the pairs of words and so on.
Essentially, an algorithm analyzes the pages and links for word combinations and assigns scores that allow the search engine to judge how important the page (and URL) might be to the person that is searching.
And of course it stores all of this information and makes it available.
The Query software is what you see when you go to a search engine - it is the front end that everybody thinks of as a search engine - familiar ground at last. It may look simple but it presents the results of all the quite remarkable search engine software that works away invisibly on our behalf.
The main feature of the query software is the box into which people type their search terms.
Type in your words, hit search and the search engine will try to match your words with the best web pages it can find through searching the web.
But this too is a metaphor and perhaps the most important one.
The query software doesn't search the web - it checks the records that have been created by its own index software. And those records have been made possible by the raw material the spider software collects.
What you need to understand about search engines
That is it. What you need to understand is that the search engine has done all the hard work of collecting and analyzing web pages, but it only makes that information available when someone does a search by entering words in the search box and hitting return.
The words people use when they search therefore determine the results the search engine presents. So search engine optimizers want to know the words people use when they search - we call them keywords - that might sound fancy but keywords are only 'the words people use when they search'.
Once you understand that a search engine can only display results based directly on what you have provided for it to display, then you really have a large grasp on the secret behind how a search engine works. Which is, be sure you have content that is not only relevant to your business, but content that also ties in closely with how a searcher may try to find your site.
We hope you found this tip useful! To read more Tools and Tips to help your business grow and succeed online click here.
Best Wishes!
Your santex-net team