How does a search engine work?

People just coming into the world of digital marketing, may not fully understand the world of search engines and how they work. This post will help you with the answers.

What is a search engine?
It is a software program that searches for sites on the world wide web based on the words that you designate as search terms.

Dominating the search landscape

Spiders
Search engines need to crawl the web pages and they use the best path which is links. The programs that crawl the web are called “bots” or “spiders” and they index the pages. There are three types of spiders, the Googlebot (Google), Slurp (Yahoo!) and MSNBot (Bing). When these spiders craw the web, they add data to the search engine index. When a user then types in a query, for example “mobile phones”, this is then checked against the search engine’s index of all the web pages it has analyzed. The results that are returned are ranked in order with the best results at the top.

Where do the spiders start?
They start with a list of page URLs that have previously been added to their index. When it visits these pages if it finds new pages, through the links, it adds more to the index. It returns to the sites in the index regularly but no search engine will tell us how often this is. Adding a sitemap to your Google webmaster tools informs Google of your site. A sitemap is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index.

Sometimes it takes a while for new pages or any modified pages for the spider to find and index. A web page may have been “spidered” but not yet “indexed.” Until a page is indexed which means it has been added to the index, the spidered pages will not be available to those searching with the search engine.

How does the search engine determine rank a page?
There are billions of web pages on the net and therefore it is very important to make sure your site is featured in the search engine result pages (SERPS). Each search engine has developed a set of rules and mathematical equations, called an algorithm to set the order of its rankings. Unfortunately no one knows what exactly goes into the algorithm. The seo (search engine optimisation) consultant will work with you to help improve your rankings and therefore traffic by following the on page and off page rules about seo.

The algorithm between the search engines is different which is what they give different results for the same query. It is important to not just focus on Google but make sure you rank well on the other search engines.

Popular websites

According to research by Nielsen, the two most heavily used web brands are Facebook and MSN/Windows Live. They account for almost 11 billion of the 48 million minutes Britons spend online. Coming in third is Google and fourth place is eBay with total UK users spending a whopping 2,560 minutes and 1,978 minutes respectively on these sites in April 2009.

Facebook is one of the major reasons people are spending more time online. People in the UK spend a total of 22 hours and 20 minutes online which is up on 34% a year ago. (April 2008 – April 2009) However, facebook recorded people spending 3.8billion more minutes in April this year than April 2008

The most heavily used web brands are those in the communication and entertainment industry. Hotmail’s instant messenger has people hooked for hours online, chatting away to friends or sending work files to colleagues. YouTube is the entertainment channel for most users online, allowing those to search for quirky videos or funny clips.

The 10 most heavily used brands online are the following:
1 Facebook
2 MSN/Windows Live
3 Google
4 eBay
5 Yahoo!
6 AOL Media Network
7 BBC
8 YouTube
9 Microsoft
10 Apple

Start seo today

What is seo?

Seo has to be one of the most talked about subjects on the internet.

Seo stands for “search engine optimisation” and is the process of how to increase traffic to your website from search engines. Some of the most well known search engines are google, yahoo, alta vista and msn. Seo is a fundamental part in website development and maintenance and everyone who is managing a website whether at home or at work should be clued up on seo.

Don’t worry if you are new to this, if you keep reading seojoblogs, you will be an seo pro in no time.

Building a brand new site

If you are building your site from scratch you will want to  liaise with your graphics, marketing and development team to plan the site. If you are lucky enough to have these people on hand to help you.  Most of the time you will have to do this by yourself.  Don’t panic, here are a few simple steps to get you on your way.

1. Content is king

That has been said over and over again but I cannot stress the importance of dynamic and rich content which include targeted keywords.  You should have relevant text on your website which you update regularly.  This means when someone types in for example “Seo blogs” they will come to this site.

2. Meta information

The meta tags are the keyword and description tags.  The description tag is seen in the search engine results page and is therefore often seen as more important than keyword tag. However, both are important and contribute to search engine ranking. The meta information is in the code behind the web page and look like:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3″>

3. Title Tags
The title tags of each page are the most important element for SEO.  It describes a specific web page. Creating relevant title tag is a very important factor in achieving high position in search engine. Title tag should contain no more than eighty characters. The title tag is a representation of the core keywords.

4. Image Tags
Images on the website should all have ALT tags. Alt tags help visually impaired people browse the site.  They are also a place where keywords should be inserted to improve rankings in SERPS.

5. Header Tags
H1, H2, H3 etc. tags are not strictly essential but they do contribute to ranking.
H1 Tag are the main heading describing the content of the page.
H2 Tags are the subheadings on each page.
H3 tags are the smaller headings.

6. Sitemap
A sitemap page is essential to help Google find all the pages and also gives you a place to link to any new ‘SEO pages’. A sitemap is an interactive table of contents that visitors can view. The site map breaks down the website’s information into different categories and can include every page of the website. Normally it is found on the footer of a website.  Some, have all the links displayed below the fold of their website and it occurs on every page.  This is a great way to provide in bound links to your site – which I will talk about next time.

That’s it for now.  That wasn’t so bad as the introduction to SEO was it?