INTRODUCTION
A “search engine” is several interlinked mechanisms that work together to identify pieces of web content — images, videos, website pages, etc. — based on the words you type into a search bar. Site owners use Search Engine Optimization to improve the chances that content on their site will show up in search results. Search engines are your portal to the internet. They take masses of information on a website, break it down, and make decisions on how well it answers a specific query. But with so much data to sift through, how do search engines actually work?
To discover, categorize, and rank the billions of websites that make up the internet, search engines employ sophisticated algorithms that make decisions on the quality and relevancy of any page. It’s a complex process involving significant amounts of data, all of which needs to be presented in a way that’s easy for end users to digest.
Before we get into the technical stuff, let’s first make sure we understand what search engines actually are, why they exist, and why any of this even matter. Using our proven website search engine optimization system, you can leverage search engines to your business’ advantage.
WHAT ARE SEARCH ENGINES?
Search engines are tools that find and rank web content matching a user’s search query.
Each search engine consists of two main parts:
- Search index: A digital library of information about web pages.
- Search algorithm(s): Computer program(s) that rank matching results from the search index.
Examples of popular search engines include Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. Our experienced search engine optimization consultants can make sure you are on the first page of search results on these platforms.
WHAT IS THE AIM OF SEARCH ENGINES?
Every search engine aims to provide the best, most relevant results for users. That’s how they obtain or maintain market share—at least in theory. Search engines are important for finding, sorting, storing and classifying the importance of online information. Popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing find and present relevant information to the users. By executing a proper SEO campaign, you can utilize search engines to:
- Substantial increase in your website traffic. We offer the best SEO strategy to increase traffic.
- Generate revenue from your E-Commerce website. Hear first-hand how our proven website search engine optimization system helped this E-commerce store.
- Increase Branding efforts and grow your business reputation. Many search engine optimization companies only focus on search engine rankings. 5280 Software LLC focuses on growing your brand online in every aspect.
- Reputation management of what people say about your business online. We offer many expert website SEO packages that can help you manage your reputation online.
- Increase Lead generation
When it comes to the natural results, the search engine is not concerned about how much a particular website owner might want to grab those top spots or think you deserve it – they only care about the people searching.
By providing the information people need, a search engine can ensure those people keep coming back to use the site again. We know how well that’s worked for Google – many of us use it every day. That primary goal leads into the secondary goal that generates the company’s profits: making money on ads. Businesses pay to advertise on search engines in large part because they know a huge number of people use them every day. As long as Google keeps its users satisfied and coming back, advertisers will continue to keep the company profitable.
So, the search engine’s main concern is therefore how to make sure the results it delivers provide the most useful information for the consumer’s query. That’s where things start to get complicated.
HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK:
Search engines try to deliver the most useful results for each user to keep large numbers of users coming back time and again. SEO results are a direct effect of how often users also come back to your website.
Search engines use three basic mechanisms:
- Web crawlers: Bots that continually browse the web for new pages. Crawlers collect the information needed to index a page correctly and use hyperlinks to hop to other pages and index them too. Search engines use their own web crawlers to discover and access web pages. All commercial search engine crawlers begin crawling a website by downloading its robots.txt file, which contains rules about what pages search engines should or should not crawl on the website. The robots.txt file may also contain information about sitemaps; this contains lists of URLs that the site wants a search engine crawler to crawl. Search engine crawlers use a number of algorithms and rules to determine how frequently a page should be re-crawled and how many pages on a site should be indexed. For example, a page which changes a regular basis may be crawled more frequently than one that is rarely modified.
- Search index: A record of all web pages online, organized in a way that allows association between keyword terms and page content. Search engines also have ways of grading the quality of content in their indexes. Webpages that have been discovered by the search engine are added into a data structure called an index. The index includes all the discovered URLs along with a number of relevant key signals about the contents of each URL such as: The keywords discovered within the page’s content – what topics does the page cover? The type of content that is being crawled (using microdata called Schema) – what is included on the page? The freshness of the page – how recently was it updated? The previous user engagement of the page and/or domain – how do people interact with the page?
- Ranking: Indexing is the process by which search engines organize information before a search to enable super-fast responses to queries. Searching through individual pages for keywords and topics would be a very slow process for search engines to identify relevant information. Instead, search engines (including Google) use an inverted index, also known as a reverse index. Furthermore, during the indexing process, search engines start making decisions on where to display specific content on the search engine results page (SERP). Ranking is accomplished by assessing a number of different factors based on an end user’s query for quality and relevancy.
The hard work starts way before you make a search. Search engines work round-the-clock, gathering information from the world’s websites and organizing that information, so it’s easy to find. This is a three-step process of first crawling web pages, indexing them, then ranking them with search algorithms.
GOOGLE SEARCH ALGORITHM.
Google is the most popular search engine on the planet. Their search engine routinely own above 90% of the market, resulting in approximately 3.5 billion of individual searches on their platform every day. While notoriously tight-lipped about how their algorithm works, Google does provide some high-level context about how they prioritize websites in the results page. New websites are created every day. Google can find these pages by following links from existing content they’ve crawled previously, or when a website owner submits their sitemap directly. Any updates to existing content can also be submitted to Google by asking them to re-crawl a specific URL. This is done through Google’s Search Console.
While Google doesn’t state how often sites are crawled, any new content that is linked to existing content will be found eventually as well.
Once the web crawlers gather enough information, they bring it back to Google for indexing.
Indexing starts by analyzing website data, including written content, images, videos, and technical site structure. This website data are things SEO and social media marketing companies like 5280 Software LLC focus on optimizing. Google is looking for positive and negative ranking signals such as keywords and website freshness to try and understand what any page they crawled is all about.
Google’s website index contains billions of pages and 100,000,000 gigabytes of data. To organize this information, Google uses a machine-learning algorithm called Rank Brain and a knowledge base called Knowledge Graph. This is all works together to help Google provide the most relevant content possible for users. Once the indexing is complete, they move on to the ranking action.
Everything that takes place up to this point is done in the background, before a user ever interacts with Google’s search functionality. Ranking is the action that occurs based on what a user is searching for. Our experienced search engine optimization consultants can make your rankings improve over time. Google looks at five major factors when someone performs a search:
- Query meaning: This determines the intent of any end user’s question. Google uses this to determine exactly what someone is looking for when they perform a search. They parse each query using complex language models built on past searches and usage behavior. Search engine marketing companies should help you determine what queries your users will be using.
- Web page relevance: Once Google has determined the intent of a user’s search query, they review the content of ranking web pages to figure out which one is the most relevant. The primary driver for this is keyword analysis. Our multiple search engine optimization services also include keyword analysis. The keywords on a website have to match Google’s understanding of the question a user asked.
- Content quality: With keywords matched, Google takes it a step further and reviews the quality of the content on the requisite web pages. This helps them prioritize which results come first by looking at the authority of a given website as well as its page rank and freshness. Overall SEO results rely heavily on the quality of your content.
- Web page usability: Google gives ranking priority to websites that are easy to use. Usability covers everything from site speed to responsiveness.
- Additional context and settings: This step tailors searches to past user engagement and specific settings within the Google platform.
CONCLUSION
In the end, it all comes down to understanding your customer. You can’t create content that ranks well if you don’t know what people are looking for when they search for your product. If you need help achieving higher rankings on the search engines, contact the experienced search engine optimization consultants at 5280 Software LLC. We have helped many clients over the years achieve first page Google rankings for both local and national. See this testimonial on how our SEO efforts got an e-commerce store’s new product on the 1st page of Google in a very short time: https://5280software.net/aiovg_videos/testimonial-website-development-seo-social-media-marketing-paddy-mccracken-rapid-connect-medical/
About 5280 Software LLC:
5280 Software LLC, located in Denver, Colorado is a premier software development and digital marketing firm. We have worked with a variety of clients over the years. Our expert team of developers have helped many small to medium sized businesses. We also work with startups, as well as enterprise level clients such as RingCentral. Our custom software development services are tailored to solve whatever challenges your business is facing. If you are looking to build a mobile app, we can deliver flawless apple ios mobile apps. We also build stunning android mobile apps. We are the pros at crafting and executing your SEO and social media marketing campaign as well.
When it comes to gaining more traffic to your website, which in time leads to more sales, you can trust our company. 5280 Software LLC is a professional SEO services company. We tailor a strategy for your company whether you are looking to target the entire US, the entire world, or if you are more focused on local SEO. Our professional SEO services also include regular reporting as well as adjusting the targeted keywords based on the movements of your keywords. We offer affordable SEO services for businesses of all sizes.
We are an organic SEO firm, using only white hat techniques to help you get more traffic. Be wary of an SEO services company that advertises they can get you on the first page of Google in a month or two. They are more than using techniques that are not acceptable to Google and in turn your website will be flagged by the Google algorithm and your site will drop in rankings drastically.
Contact us today with your website’s URL and we will put together a free SEO analysis. It will include pricing and timeline to get your site ranked on the first page of Google.
When it comes to Social Media Marketing as well as email marketing campaigns, we are here to assist you as well. 5280 Software LLC has a better online marketing strategy than our competitors. We take the time the setup a strategy with you that also includes competitor and market research. You need the right online marketing strategy to see the highest ROI. For a testimonial from one of our clients about how our digital marketing and SEO helped them gain high traffic and revenues, check out this testimonial.
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