Simplified Explanation of How Search Engines Work
Search engines display results in a matter of seconds when we type our queries and click on the search button. The search results are very accurate, and the information presented is precisely what we need. How search engines work is a complicated process even though outwardly it appears to be very simple. There is a lot of homework involved, and the process, which includes three steps, begins with first finding all the information that is available on the internet. After the data is found, it is understood and properly organized so that the most precise answers can be displayed to the person who is searching.
For your content to be placed in the Search Engine Results Page, it needs to be first seen by the search engines. Your website needs to be optimized in such a way that your content is easily accessed and can get high rankings by the search engines.
Easy Understanding of Mechanism Behind Working of Search Engine
The way search engines work can be understood clearly by explaining in detail the following three-step process involved, which consists of:
1. Crawling: Search engines have got programs called spiders or crawlers that are assigned the job of scanning the internet and finding information. These crawlers search the internet and discover the servers which host websites. Their job is to scan each website and discover the number of pages contained in different formats, such as text, images, video, CSS, Javascript, etc.
They also follow any links that may refer to external websites or other pages inside the site. In this way, the crawlers keep gathering more and more information. This is a continuous process, and any additions or deletions made to a website or updates made to links are also noted. The volume of work done by the crawlers can be imagined from the fact that thousands of pages are being published daily on the internet, and there are millions of individual pages available.
2. Indexing: The next step done by search engines is to store, sort, and organize the information found by crawlers. This indexed content will be processed later by the algorithms and then made available as a result of the queries made by the searcher. The information related to the content, such as the date of creation or updating, description of the page, title, keywords, etc. are what the search engines store in their index.
Indexing is important since only those websites stored in the index appear as search results. Your content has got more chances of being displayed in search results if you have more number of pages in the indexes. Thus, indexing has an important place among the search engines work processes.
3. Ranking: This is the third step in which the search engines decide which results are more relevant to be displayed in the SERPs and in what position they should appear. This is done by algorithms, the software that analyzes the queries and decides which information has to be returned. Following a good SEO practice will help to influence the algorithms and get a good ranking. You will get more traffic if your website is displayed among the top positions in the search results. It can be seen that ranking holds a vital position among the three search engines work processes.
Conclusion
This shows how important it is to understand how search engines work. The work done by the search engines is an enormous task and can be done only in an automated manner. Knowing about the processes followed by search engines will help you to make adopt proper SEO strategies and make relevant changes to your website. It will then enable you to get better rankings and an increase in traffic to your website. Your site should be designed in such a way that the crawling and indexing processes can be done easily by the search engines, and your site will get a high ranking in the search results picked by the algorithms.
If you have an online store, then it is essential that you understand how search engines work so that you can optimize the entire website accordingly. You can also hire Singapore SEO experts to help you out. Contact us to find out how.