Whenever you enter a word in a search engine and hit ‘enter’ you get a list of web results that contain that particular term. Normally users tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others, then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
How Search Engines operate
There are hundred millions of pages available, holding up to present data on a stunning assortment of themes. But do you know which pages are good to read? Search engines are special sites on the Web that are designed to help people to find information stored on other sites. Various search engines work in diverse ways, yet they all perform the same three tasks. They search the Internet based on important keywords. They keep a list of the words they find, and where they find them. They allow users to look for words or combinations of words found in that index. All together, Search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving. First of all, the search engines crawl the web to see what is there. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler. They follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Keep in mind that the number of pages on the Web is very high, so that it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two. After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can be retrieved later. When a person performs an online search, the search engine scours its corpus of billions of documents and does two things: first, it returns only those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher’s query; second, it ranks those outcomes as indicated by the prevalence of the sites serving the data. It is both relevance and popularity that the procedure of SEO is intended to impact.
How do search engines determine relevance and popularity?
Search engines typically assume that the more popular a website, page, or document, the more significant the information it contains must be. This assumption has proven fairly successful in terms of user satisfaction with search results. Popularity and relevance aren’t determined manually. There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or Meta tags. That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string. The last step in search engines’ activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser – i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites.
To be Continued…
