Search engines are similar to answering machines for the users. Their existence is to discover, understanding, and organize the content on the internet for offering the most relevant search results for user queries. For your content to appear in the search results, it must be visible to the search engines. Arguably how to do this is one of the more significant pieces of the SEO puzzle. In case your website cannot be found by the search engines there is no way you are going to appear in the search engine results pages also called SERPs. There are three primary functions performed by the search engines viz. crawling, indexing, and ranking.
How do search engines work?
All search engines appear simple from the outset. You can type in a keyword and you receive a list of relevant pages. However, this seemingly straightforward interchange requires a great deal of computationally heavy lifting on the back end. This hard work begins even before you have searched for something. These search engines work round the clock as they are continually gathering info from the different websites in the world and then they organize this information so that it is easy to find. Let’s take a closer look at crawling, indexing, and ranking.
Crawling
Crawlers are automated scripts that scour the internet for information. They begin their work by using a list of websites. The algorithms automatically determine the websites that the crawlers will crawl. These algorithms are also responsible for deciding the number of pages to crawl and the number of times this must be done. As an SEO marketer, you need to ensure that your website is accessible to the crawlers. If the bots cannot crawl the site they cannot index it and as a result, the website will not appear in the SERPs.
Indexing
After locating a web page the bot fetches or renders it similar to a browser. The bot must be able to visualize what you are seeing including videos, photos, and other kinds of dynamic content. Bots then organize this content into different categories such as CSS, text, HTML, and keywords, etc. This allows the crawler to comprehend what is on a page. Then search engines store the info within an index which a huge database. The marketers must be able to ensure that the crawlers see your website and be able to control the portions of the website you wish to be indexed.
Ranking
The final step for the search engines is to sort through the indexed info and return the proper results for all queries. This is done by using search algorithms. The algorithms analyze what the searchers are looking for and what results answer the question best. Search engines are looking to show more usable, and relevant results to the user. It keeps the searchers happy and the advertisement revenue is generated as a result. The search engine ranking factors are the same as those used by human searchers for judging the content such as content freshness, page speed, and links to other useful content. When you are designing and refreshing the sites you need to optimize the page speed, keyword density, and readability for sending out positive signals to the search engines. You can use different metrics available with the use of online tools for gathering the relevant data.
After you have become aware of how the search engines work, it becomes simpler to develop different sites that are crawlable and can be indexed. If you can send the right signals to the search engines it guarantees that your pages will appear in the results pages relevant to the business. If your business is operating from Clearwater & Tampa Bay, FL area you can get in touch with ISEOU Company to ensure that you have done all SEO requirements right and the final content is good for the crawlers.