The internet is a vast landscape of information just waiting to be tapped and discovered, and this journey often starts with a search engine. While it’s possible to skip this part and go directly to a specific website, many of us use search engines to navigate through all the online content and pages available to find what we’re looking for, and this is made much easier as search engines often compile a list of relevant results based on our search queries.
Not only does this save users a lot of time and effort that would’ve been spent scouring through different websites, but it also has the added benefit of ranking these results based on relevance and popularity.
What is a Search Engine?
A search engine is a software program that accepts user input in the form of keywords and phrases and returns a ranked list of results to help the user find specific information, with the most relevant results taking up the top of the list.
Search engine algorithms can give users these results quickly by scanning different websites on the internet and indexing them along the way, as well as looking at specific elements such as page titles, content, and keywords to determine how well they align with what the user has searched for.
Naturally, users often click for the topmost results, which is why brands and businesses are looking for search engine optimization (SEO) solutions and strategies to get a favorable position in search engine results pages to draw in more organic traffic and engagement.
How Do Search Engines Work?
You might be wondering how search engines manage to scour through millions of websites and rank them based on their relevance to the user’s search query in a matter of seconds. Search engines do this with a few steps:
Step 1: Crawling
Search engines utilize automated web crawlers or spiders to thoroughly browse the internet to find and index different websites, which is the process of storing online content in an organized manner for later use.
These crawlers do this by following different links and systematically collecting the necessary information for indexing. The process of crawling is made much easier when the website is structured well and uses sitemaps, which helps the crawlers better traverse through the content.
Step 2: Indexing
As mentioned above, indexing is the act of storing the information gathered by crawlers and spiders in an organized database. This makes the collected information much more easily accessible when a user enters a search query, with keywords and metadata playing crucial roles by helping search engines better understand and categorize the content more accurately.
Step 3: Ranking
Once the necessary data has been collected and organized into a database, search engine algorithms help rank the search results based on different criteria—relevance, authority, user experience, and more—to ensure that the most relevant and helpful result is placed at the top. These algorithms often adapt to the ever-changing online landscape, which means that they’re constantly evolving and ranking these results according to different factors.
Step 4: Retrieval
This is when the user enters their search query into the search engine, which triggers the search engine to retrieve the relevant information from its index or database. Search engines use advanced matching algorithms to understand the user’s query and only choose the indexed content that more or less matches it.
When that’s done, the search engine then returns a list of results to the user, making sure to provide diverse and related results for a positive search experience.
How to Optimize a Website for Search Engines?
As mentioned above, many businesses are looking for SEO professionals to optimize their websites and content to get a good ranking on search engine results pages as this will provide much more exposure and traffic for their sites, which can translate into customers and profit.
There are a few practices and strategies that SEO professionals and agencies employ to do this:
Keyword Research
SEO professionals take the time to figure out the most popular and competitive keywords that users are searching for. By understanding what queries your target audience is interested in, you’ll be able to create content that is related to these queries, while also integrating it into your webpage to appeal to search engine algorithms.
On-Page SEO
This is all about optimizing your website for search engines, and there are a few ways that you can do this. The first is to include target keywords and queries into the page’s content, page title, headers, and URL in a natural way. Aside from informing readers what to expect from your webpage, this also makes it easier for search engines to understand what your content is about and rank it accordingly based on the user’s search query.
Well-Written Content
It’s important not to overlook the importance of good-quality content. One of the many benefits of ensuring that all of your content is original, helpful, informative, and aligned with user’s search queries is that it gives your audience a positive user experience, which can help improve your chances of securing a good ranking.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO aims to improve overall user experience, while also making it easier for search engines to crawl and understand a website. Some popular strategies include ensuring that your page loads quickly by optimizing all the elements of your page, optimizing your website to work smoothly on both mobile and desktop devices, as well as making sure that the different parts and elements of your website aren’t constantly moving around.
Link Building
With search engines also taking into account the credibility of a website, link building becomes a great opportunity to establish yourself as a reliable source of information. Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from different websites and sources that will lead back to your website and content. Search engines will view each good-quality link as a vote of confidence, which will help you achieve your goal of a better rank.
The Takeaway
With a series of processes and algorithms, search engines can understand a user’s search query and quickly return a ranked list of results based on relevance, authority, and user experience among other things.
By understanding what search engines are looking for in a good website, SEO professionals can leverage these criteria and perform the necessary optimizations on clients’ websites to increase their chances of ranking higher on search engine results pages.
