Nowadays, there is one of the most prominent online marketing strategic plan that is affiliated to the Search Engine Land. Yes! Of course, you guessed it right. It is none other than SEO.
Whereby, Search Engine Optimization (in short SEO) is part of the wide marketing discipline. Focused on growing organic visibility (non-paid) search engine results.
In other words, it’s the process of improving the position that your website appears in the “organic search results.” For example, returned by sites such as Google, Yandex, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
And as a matter of fact, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t just about building yourself a search engine-friendly sites. But, it’s more about various ways on how to make your site better for people too. Furthermore, jmexclusives believes that these principles go hand-in-hand.
Google-friendly sites as the name suggests allows a clear and transparent flow of page content on search engines. Especially the Google custom search engine followed by others which include and are not limited to Bing, Yahoo, AOL, and Yandex.
But, the main question today is, What is the meaning of Search Engines? Do you have any idea?
What is a Search Engine?
A Search Engine is a software, usually accessed on the Internet, that searches a database of information according to the website user query. The engine provides a list of results that best match what the user is trying to find.
Today, there are many different search engines available on the Internet, each with their own abilities and features. The first search engine ever developed is considered Archie, which was used to search for FTP files and the first text-based search engine is considered Veronica.
Currently, the most popular and well-known search engine is Google. Other popular search engines include AOL, Ask.com, Baidu, Bing, and Yahoo. For users, a search engine is accessed through a browser on their computer, smartphone, tablet, or another device.
Also, today, most new browsers use an Omnibox, which is a text box at the top of the browser. The Omnibox allows users to type in a URL or a search query. You can also visit one of the major search engine home pages to perform a search.
With this in mind, you can read and learn more about How a Search Engine works.
What is a Web Browser?
A Web Browser is basically a software that is used to access the internet. Whereby, a web browser lets you visit websites and do activities within them like login. As well as, view multimedia, link from one site to another, visit one page from another, print, send and receive an email. Among many other activities.
The most common browser software titles on the market are Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera. Browser availability depends on the operating system your computer is using. For example, Microsoft Windows, Linux, Ubuntu, Mac OS, among others.
Read Also: What is Behind a Web Browser?
For instance, when you type a web page address such as www.josephmuciraexclusives.com into your browser, that web page in its entirety is not actually stored on a server ready and waiting to be delivered. In fact, each web page that you request is individually created in response to your request.
You are actually calling up a list of requests to get content from various resource directories. Or servers on which the content for that page is stored. It is rather like a recipe for a cake. Whereby, you have a shopping list of ingredients (requests for content). That, when combined in the correct order, bakes a cake (the web page).
The page may be made up of content from different sources. Images may come from one server, text content from another, and even scripts. Such as date scripts from another and ads from another. As soon as you move to another page, the page that you have just viewed disappears. This is the dynamic nature of websites.
How do Search Engines work?
If you are a website developer, website designer, small business owner, marketing professional, or even a website owner (like jmexclusives) you need to consider the search engine basics. While thinking of creating a personal blog or website for your business.
Having a clear understanding of how search works, can help you create a website that search engines can understand, and this has a number of added benefits. It’s the first step you need to take before even dealing with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or any other SEM (Search Engine Marketing) tasks.
Search engines are complex computer programs;
Before they even allow you to type a query and search the web, they have to do a lot of preparation work so that when you click “Search”, you are presented with a set of precise and quality results that answer your question or query.
What does ‘preparation work’ includes? Two main stages. The first stage is the process of discovering the information. And the second stage is organizing the information. So that it can be used later for search purposes.
This is generally known in the Internet World as Crawling and Indexing.
Crawling
Search engines have a number of computer programs called web crawlers (thus the word Crawling). In that case, they are responsible for finding information that is publicly available on the Internet.
To simplify a complicated process, it’s enough for you to know that the job of these software crawlers (also known as search engine spiders) is. To scan the Internet and find the servers (also known as webservers) hosting websites.
They create a list of all the webservers to crawl, the number of websites hosted by each server and then start work.
They visit each website and by using different techniques. And try to find out how many pages they have. Whether it is text content, images, videos or any other format. Like CSS, HTML, javascript, etc.
When visiting a website, besides taking note of the number of pages they also follow any links. Either pointing to pages within the site or to external websites. And thus they discover more and more pages.
They do this continuously and they also keep track of changes made to a website. So that they know when new pages are added or deleted when links are updated, etc.
If you take into account that there are more than 130 trillion individual pages on the Internet today. And on average thousands of new pages are published on a daily basis, you can imagine that this is a lot of work.
Why care about the crawling process?
Your first concern when optimizing your website for search engines is to ensure that they can access it correctly.
Otherwise, if they cannot ‘read’ your website, you shouldn’t expect much in terms of high rankings or search engine traffic.
As explained above, crawlers have a lot of work to do and you should try and make their job easier.
There are a number of things to do to make sure that crawlers can discover and access your website in the fastest possible way without problems.
- Use Robots.txt to specify which pages of your website you don’t want crawlers to access. For example, pages like your admin or backend pages and other pages you don’t want to be publicly available on the Internet.
- Big search engines like Google and Bing, have tools (aka Webmaster tools), you can use to give them more information about your website (number of pages, structure, etc) so that they don’t have to find it themselves.
- Use an XML sitemap to list all important pages of your website so that the crawlers can know which pages to monitor for changes and which to ignore.
Indexing
Crawling alone is not enough to build a search engine.
Information identified by the crawlers needs to be organized, sorted and stored so that it can be processed by the search engine algorithms before made available to the end-user.
This process is called Indexing.
Search engines don’t store all the information found on a page in their index. But they keep things like: when it was created/updated, title and description of the page, type of content, associated keywords, incoming and outgoing links. And a lot of other parameters that are needed by their algorithms.
Google likes to describe its index like the back of a book (a really big book).
Why care about the indexing process?
It’s very simple, if your website is not in their index, it will not appear for any searches.
This also implies that the more pages you have in the search engine indexes, the more are your chances of appearing in the search results when someone types a query.
Notice that I mentioned the word ‘appear in the search results’, which means in any position and not necessarily on the top positions or pages.
In order to appear in the first 5 positions of the SERPs (search engine results pages), you have to optimize your website for search engines. Using a process called Search Engine Optimization or SEO in short.
Ranking
Search Engine Ranking Algorithms
The third and final step in the process is for search engines to decide which pages to show in the SERPS and in what order when someone types a query.
This is achieved through the use of search engine ranking algorithms.
In simple terms, these are pieces of software that have a number of rules that analyze what the user is looking for and what information to return.
These rules and decisions are made based on what information is available in their index.
How do search engine algorithms work?
Over the years search engine ranking algorithms have evolved and became really complex.
At the beginning (think 2001) it was as simple as matching the user’s query with the title of the page but this is no longer the case.
Google’s ranking algorithm takes into account more than 255 rules before making a decision and nobody knows for sure what these rules are.
And this includes Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google’s founders), who created the original algorithm.
Things have changed a lot and now machine learning and computer programs are responsible for making decisions based on a number of parameters that are outside the boundaries of the content found on a web page.
Why is Search Engine important?
Generally speaking, the more your website is search friendly to the search engines, the more it breaks down the workload for the engine’s internal technicality.
Additionally, the Google-friendly web pages are easily found by the algorithm crawlers, scripts, and bots.
It’s not hard to understand why the human population’s attention span is getting shorter. And that the majority of people believe themselves to be busier than they have ever been.
So how does a person keep all of this information straight?
1. Information Management
With the amount of information that we sift through on a daily basis, it is virtually impossible to remember everything that we need to know.
Like names, dates, figures, phone numbers, email address and so on and so forth. Most of us have tools that remember our information and will retrieve it on demand.
For instance, Microsoft Outlook helps us to manage our email. We have project managers for our jobs that help us sift through pertinent information. And when you want to find a product, service or a piece of information online, we use a Search Engine.
2. Online Content Research
According to Google, they are seeing over one trillion searches performed each year. That is about three billion searches a day.
Needless to say, you are not alone when it comes to finding useful information via a search engine. Search Engines are right at your fingertips and have become a part of the daily life of most.
They’ve become readily accepted in contemporary culture that the word Google now appears in the dictionary. Not defined only as a noun, but also as a verb as in to “Google Something.”
3. Information Data Filtering
Essentially, a Search Engine acts as a filter for a wealth of available information on the Internet.
Search Engines allow users to not only quickly, but also easily, find the information that is of interest or value to them. It also eliminates the need to wade through numerous amounts of irrelevant web pages.
In addition, it’s safe to say that the goal of a Search Engine is to provide the user with search results that lead to relevant information on a high-quality website. The ideal word here being “relevant”.
In order for a Search Engine to attain and retain a market, they need to make sure to deliver results. That are relevant to what the user is searching for.
This is accomplished by maintaining databases of web pages. Search Engines use complex algorithms to assess websites and web pages in order to assign them a ranking for relevant search phrases.
4. Easy Access Of Internet
For a typical query, there are thousands, even millions, of web pages with potentially relevant information. So, how does Google figure out what to show in your search results? Well, the journey starts before you even type your search.
As we speak, Google is using web crawlers. To organize information from web pages and other publicly available content in the Search index.
For example, Google ranking systems sort through hundreds of billions of web pages in the Search index to give you useful and relevant results in a fraction of a second. Especially those affluent and rich enough in relation to Google-friendly sites.
Google-friendly sites make the backend work a lot easier for the crawlers. To bid for the best search snippets to output. However, other key points are considered during the results output.
Which are the most used Search Engine Platforms?
Besides Google and Bing, there are other search engines that may not be so well known. But still serves millions of search queries per day.
It may be a shocking surprise for many people but Google is not the only search engine available on the Internet today! In fact, there are a number of search engines that want to take Google’s throne. But none of them is ready (yet) to even pose a threat.
Recent statistics (updated September 2019), show that Google is the most popular search engine Worldwide with a stunning 81.5% market share.
Takeaway,
I once read that the average person living in a modern industrialized society is exposed. To so many different pieces of information in a single day. As a person living 100 years ago would have seen in a year. That includes advertisements, newspaper headlines, websites, text messages, traffic signs, T-shirt slogans, and so on and so forth.
It’s hardly surprising that attention spans are getting shorter. And that the majority of people believe themselves to be busier than ever.
With this information overload, it is next to impossible to remember everything we need to. Like to call up names, dates, figures, phone numbers, email addresses, and all the corporate info. And client information we need to do business effectively. That’s why we use tools to do the remembering and information retrieval for us.
As an example, my company uses Salesforce to handle the bulk of jmexclusives customer relationship management information. Not forgetting, I also use Microsoft Outlook to manage emails. And when I want to find a product, service solutions or piece of information online, I use a Search Engine!
Resources;
Finally, I am hoping that the above-revised guide on the Search Engine was helpful. But, for more related online FAQs, feel free to Contact Us.
Or rather, share your thoughts in the comments box below this blog. Below are more related to the topic links;
- What is Search Engine Optimization?
- Google-friendly Sites Beginners Guidelines
- What is a Web Query Parameter?
- URL Components | The Most Important Parts Explained
- Schema Markup for more WordPress sites CTR & Ranking