How Search Engines Work

Business owners consistently hear about how they need to optimize their website. Well, what does actually mean? Here is an attempt at explaining the process in the least technical way I can. This will be a little over-simplified but you should have a pretty good idea of what this is all about by the time you are done reading.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of creating a website that will actually show up when someone uses a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing to find your products or services. The work required to do this is generally split into two parts. The first part consists of work that needs to be done on the actual pages of your website. Some of the things that need to be worked on are the text, page titles, page descriptions and file names of your pages. The second part is work that needs to be done off of your website. This primarily includes getting websites with similar content to link back to you.

How Do Search Engines Work?

There are a variety of factors that play into how web pages are ranked when someone types something into a search engine. Here is a simplified explanation of the process.

Step 1: Someone types the service they are looking for into a search engine.

In this example we are looking for a plumber in Boston.

Step 2: The search engine will analyze the words that were typed in.

In this case the words are “plumber”, “in” and “boston”.

Step 3: The search engine will match what was typed in with all of the web pages it has indexed that contain the words “plumber”, “in” and “boston” as well as the complete phrase “plumber in boston”.

The search engine will give priority to the phrase “plumber in boston” and then look for individual instances of the words “plumber” and “boston” appearing on the same page throughout all of the web pages it is aware of. Not only does it scan the text that appears on the website but it will also scan the text in the Meta Tags. The Meta Tags include information such as the title of the web page and a description. There could be millions of different web pages that match depending on the search term used.

Step 4: The search engine will also take into consideration how many other different web pages are linking to those pages.

Links coming from pages with similar content, phrases and words are given more weight than pages that have nothing in common with the page they are linking to.

Step 5: The names of the files the web designer used to build those pages will also be taken into consideration.

Including the names of your services and location in names of the files used to build your website can help to improve your search engine ranking.

Step 6: The search engine displays a list of results.

The search results are generally based on a combination of the search phrase used, text matches to that search phrase on websites, links to those websites from websites with similar content and the names of the files used to build those websites.

There are obviously other factors taken into consideration such as how long the website has been online, how often it is updated, if it includes a site map, how quickly it loads and so on. But for the most part, this should give you a pretty good starting point as to understanding how search engines work and why optimizing your website may be a good idea. If you have spent a good deal of money on your website and no one can find then what was the point of spending the money in the first place?

This article about how search engines work comes to us courtesy of  CheapAssWebsite.com home of the cheap website.