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How Do Search Engines Work?

How Do Search Engines Work
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Do you want to drive free organic traffic to your website? Well, it’s important that you understand how search engines work. Now it can be a bit confusing for beginners and that’s why I decided to create this article.

After all, the search engine is extremely complex. Anyone who is trying to get a piece of the search engine pie is constantly trying to understand how a website ranks and for which reasons.

Even after you feel like you’ve broken the code, search engine algorithms are constantly being changed to combat those who choose to use black hat SEO methods.

Now I can’t tell you exactly how search engine algorithms work, but I’ll try to provide you with some basic information to help you understand how search engines work. Without further ado, let’s get started.

What Is A Search Engine’s Priority?

Before you can begin understanding how a search engine works, it’s crucial that you also understand what is a search engine’s priority. Now it’s quite straightforward.

The purpose or priority of a search engine is to provide the best results for whatever the person is searching for.

For example, if someone makes a Google search for how fast does a cheetah run. Google’s search engine priority is to provide that searcher with content that answers him or her.

Priority #1. Search engines don’t care about you or your website. All they care about is the user experience of their searchers.

What happens if you’re searching for how fast does a cheetah run and the search engine is giving you irrelevant search results? Chances are, you’ll move on to another search engine and never come back. That’s why many people use Google because they are good at what they do.

Priority #2. Search engines like Google are also generating large amounts of money from companies paying for Google ads. So they have to satisfy their advertisers by providing them with quality traffic otherwise they won’t come back.

Both priorities revolve around the same thing. Their main concern is to ensure that their searchers are getting relevant results when using their search engine.

What Is Indexing For A Search Engine?

indexed example
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There are approximately 1.94 billion websites in the world (as of December 2018), so in order for a search engine to properly identify the right content for every possible search query.

Search engines create an index of web pages to ensure that they have something for their searchers no matter what the topic is.

What index does is it tries to identify keywords that people search in text or video content. This ensures their readers are going to get the right search results.

Since search engines have more than enough content, they also need to properly assign the right content that covers the same topic. Typically, search results on the first page are the best results in their opinion. Do you want to learn how to rank on the first page of Google?

What Is A Website Crawler?

It’s not surprising that the indexing process is done through a computer. After all, there are approximately 1.94 billion websites out there. A website crawlers job is to identify all website pages out there.

Each time a website crawler crawls a page, it collects information to help get it indexed on the search engines. Once a page is added to the search engine index, it will also crawl other links within that page to crawl.

website crawler infographic
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Image Source: Imperva.com

If you are a new website owner, you can speed up this process and inform Google of your website by submitting a sitemap.

What Is A Search Engine Algorithm?

google algorithm changes
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Image Source: Square2Marketing.com

Now that you know there are approximately 1.94 billion websites in the world and search engine crawlers are designed to crawl and index websites. The Search Engine Algorithm is designed to use search engine ranking factors to assign positions to each website.

That’s why whenever there is an algorithm change, people experience changes in their search engine results for their website and pages. If you utilize white hat SEO methods, you’re usually going to end up okay.

However, if you use black hat methods, you can expect your website to jump from the front all the way to the back of the search engine results page.

What Are Search Engine Ranking Factors?

Now there are many different ranking factors for search engines. No one can truly tell you exactly what they are. But here are some that we know are important to search engines according to some of the greatest SEO experts out there like Neil Patel.

  • Domain Age: The older your website, the more trustworthy it is. That’s why they have higher authority rankings compared to newer websites. This is because older websites are more likely to stick around compared to a brand new one.
  • External Links (Backlinks): Having a lot of external links pointing to your website is a positive sign that your website is valuable. Otherwise, why would people link back to your website or page? Now keep in mind, the links need to be high quality and relevant. A website about fitness pointing to a make money online website doesn’t show a whole lot.
  • Site Speed: If your website is slow, it won’t do as well because it affects your user’s experience. Nobody has the time nor patience to wait for your website to load when there is plenty of information out there. Learn how you can speed up your website with the W3 Total Cache plugin.
  • Keywords: Since search engines are trying to provide the most relevant results for their searchers. If you want to get ranked for a specific keyword or keyphrase, you’ll want to include them in your pages and posts. Personally, I use the Jaaxy Keyword Research Tool to help me find keywords with high search volume and not so competitive.
  • Mobile Friendliness: With how many searches made on mobile devices, it is important that your website is mobile-friendly. Now keep in mind, just because your website looks great on a desktop (larger screen), it might look hideous on a mobile device.
  • Bounce Rate: Search engines like Google tracks what people do when they use their search engine. If someone clicks on your website and leaves immediately, it’s a strong signal that the searcher did not find what they were looking for. As a result, they’ll lower your search engine rankings. Learn more about bounce rate!

The reason why it’s hard to provide you with the exact search engine ranking factors is that search engines don’t openly talk about it. That way they can prevent people from manipulating the search engine resulting in poor user experience.

In Conclusion

As you can see, there’s a lot to learn about search engines. So much that it’s surprising when you find out because we’ve always viewed search engines as a resource to find information.

Simply search for what you’re looking for and click on the displayed results.

But as an online business owner, internet marketer, blogger. Understanding how search engines work will only benefit you.

I hope this was helpful! If you need help with anything, please leave a comment down below and I will try my best to help you out.

What do you know about search engines?

Kind Regards,

home, make money online home, make money online now, make money working from home, niche, niche website, self employed, SEO
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Eric Chen

A regular person who envisions his success from helping you become successful. He is not featured in the New York Times, but we all start somewhere, right?Life Motto: Nobody will ever pay you, the way you pay yourself. Be your own boss and control your own income.

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