How Search Engines Work
Written by Martin Wong on September 30, 2009
The search engine industry is poise to grow from $12B in 2007 to $25B industry in 2011 – 100% growth in just 4 years (SEMPO)
How Search Engines Work
Search engines have web crawlers (also called robots or spiders) that are constantly scanning the World Wide Web and indexing searchable information. These crawlers can’t see any of the visual components on your website (to see exactly what they see, right click in your browser and select “view source”). Instead, they scan and index what they find in your web page’s code:
- The website’s title
- The website description and keyword meta tags
- Headings and formatted text on the page
- The text and keywords on the webpage
- Internal and external links on the webpage
- Photo descriptions in the alt tags
The information is then encoded to save space and indexed into a series of massive databases. So, when you enter a query into a search engine, it searches the database of information that the webcrawler (or bot) has stored. If someone types the query “real estate” into the search box, the search engine will search its database for all pages that contain that keyword.
To provide the best possible search results, the search engine uses an algorithm that analyzes both the contents of the stored webpage and how these similar webpages link to each other. By analyzing how the webpages link to each other, the algorithm is able to determine how relevant each page is to the search query and whether the pages are considered reputable and thereby deserving of a high ranking.
The Evolution of Search
While the original search engines in the 1990s focused entirely upon on-site factors such as the site’s content and the keywords on the page, today’s cutting edge search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! are more interested in the relationship between your web pages. By analyzing how pages link together and also the quantity and quality of these links, their algorithms are able to rank webpages based on their relevancy to the search keywords.
So, if you want your webpages to rank near the top of the search rankings, you will need to optimize the on-site contents of your webpages for your targeted keywords so they are properly indexed. But more importantly, you will need a carefully planned strategy to create compelling content and build link relationships with similar websites to your business, particularly those that are already ranking well on search engines. That is as close as you’re going to get to a secret to ranking well on search engines.
Related Topics:
- What Is Internet Marketing?
- Search Engine Marketing Explained
- Content Management Systems (CMS) Explained
- What Is S.E.O.?
- What Is Web Analytics?
- Internet Marketing Tools
Back > Internet Marketing Learning Center
COMMENTS