How Do Search Engines Work?

How Do Search Engines Work?

Basically crawler-based search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, create listings by “crawling” the web and indexing the text content. Crawler-based search engines will eventually find any changes made on a website which can affect how you are listed. Titles of the page, body copy and other elements play an important role.

An algorithm isn’t human and it only looks at text. A search engine doesn’t understand a cool design or sounds and movies. Search engine spiders crawl the web looking at text. They index, process, calculate relevancy and retrieve. Your website’s links, keyword density and Meta tags are all important aspects that will determine how well it ranks.

Make it a priority to check out a spider simulator to see how all the bells and whistles on your site look––or don’t look. (We’ll cover how to use a spider simulator – and where to find one – after we talk about effective SEO elements on a website.)

Are All Search Engines the Same?

Search engines basically operate the same, but it’s the minor differences that can determine if your websites emerge victorious in results relevancy. For Yahoo and Bing, keyword factors are most relevant. For Google, relevant links are the most important keys.

Yahoo has no preference for sites with respect to age. Google, on the other hand, will rank a site for its age and longevity. Google respects website maturity. Thus, the smart marketer or designer will study the differences in search engines and use their indexing platforms to his or her advantage. If your plan is to conquer more than one search engine, you’ll need to optimize carefully and know how each search engine is likely to respond.

Two Areas Of SEO

There are two basic areas of SEO – On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.

On-Page SEO is the optimization of a website’s content, text, tags and other elements. It includes your content, keywords, meta tags and other things located on your website.

Off-Page SEO is everything you do to get your website to rank well that is not actually located on the site itself. Instead, it’s elsewhere on the web. Off-Page SEO can include article marketing, social media, other blogs linking back to you and other mentions of your website on the Internet.

In this lesson, we’ll cover On-Page SEO and talk about how to choose a good domain name. Later we’ll cover Off-Page SEO.

On-Page Search Engine Optimization

Again, On-Page SEO is the optimization of a website’s content, text, tags and other elements. On-Page SEO includes your content, keywords, meta tags and other things located on your website. First, let’s talk about why it’s important to rank well in the search engines…

Because there are two types of traffic: Paid and Free

We’ll talk more about traffic later, but for now you just need to know that free traffic refers to any traffic you get without using paid advertising. One of the most powerful ways to generate free traffic is to build a “search engine friendly” website.

The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe website designs, menus, content management systems, images, videos, shopping carts and other elements that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure. – Wikipedia

There are a lot of web designers out there who now claim to make their websites “search engine friendly”, but unless you really know what you’re doing, it’s a bad idea to say you do. So let’s get started with how to build a website that is search engine friendly…

First, you have to know what your client’s keywords are…we’ll cover this next time!