You type a term in the search box and with under a second you have millions of results.
I just typed “holidays” in Google and in less than half a second it returned 220 million results that it has put in order to which it feels is most important.
How Do Search Engines Work Explained
Search engines have 3 jobs to do, they send SEO spiders out to websites, followed by indexing and then when you search it returns the results to the user.
Search engines store information, they say Google is well past 10 billion web pages, which they retrieve from the World Wide Web itself. These web pages are retrieved by spiders which follow every web link it comes across.
The content of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed, for example words are extracted from page titles, headings, Meta tags and many other aspects of a website.
The data extracted is stored in a data base for use later when someone searches for a phrase or word. Google store all or part of web pages where AltaVista store every word of every page.
Then when a user enters a phrase or keyword the search engine examines its index and provides a listing of best matching web pages according to its criteria usually with a short description of the web page.
Why Does Knowing How Search Engines Work Help You
A quick explanation of all the SEO basics can be found here. SEO Basics
But, there is one important thing you will learn today.
Content Content Content….. remember that word because it is the job of search engines to provide good content to users searching for information. That is what the World Wide Web is all about.
People look for information and webmasters create it. The search engine is the middle man that finds and supplies this information.
The money they spend on technology on getting their search results as good as possible is beyond me. Their results will get better and better as time goes on as there is never any point trying to cheat your way to the top of search engines.
Ask Yourself This Question.
Q. Would a search engine rank a website with 20 pages based on dogs higher than a website with 200 pages based on dogs.
A. It is quite simple. This is just one single variable that they base their methods on. If this was the only method then the 200 page website would cross the line first, every time.
Another Question For You.
Q. Would search engines rank a 20 page beautifully designed website with amazing graphics and images that is selling web design higher than a 20 page website full of keyword rich content telling you how to do web design?
A. The same amount of pages but the second choice has the content, it has the information.
Conclusion Of How Do Search Engines Work
Knowing that content is the backbone of your website, it drives you up the search engines rankings. 80% of your time should be spent building content until you have a minimum of 100 web pages. If this is a struggle then blogging can play a big part in increasing traffic.
Content is what will attract traffic and push you flying past those competitors. The content process always works.
But do not go rushing of just yet and start typing page after page, the content you supply has to be spider friendly and keyword rich.