Rank Your Website In No 1

 How do search engines work?

Search engines have three primary functions:

Crawl: Scour the Internet for content, looking over the code/content for each URL they find.

Index: Store and organize the content found during the crawling process. Once a page is in the index, it’s in the running to be displayed as a result to relevant queries.

Rank: Provide the pieces of content that will best answer a searcher's query, which means that results are ordered by most relevant to least relevant.

Crawling

Crawling is the process by which search engines discover updated content on the web, such as new sites or pages, changes to existing sites, and dead links.

To do this, a search engine uses a program that can be referred to as a ‘crawler’, ‘bot’ or ‘spider’ (each search engine has its own type) which follows an algorithmic process to determine which sites to crawl and how often.

As a search engine’s crawler moves through your site it will also detect and record any links it finds on these pages and add them to a list that will be crawled later. This is how new content is discovered.

Indexing

Once a search engine processes each of the pages it crawls, it compiles a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. It is essentially a database of billions of web pages.

This extracted content is then stored, with the information then organised and interpreted by the search engine’s algorithm to measure its importance compared to similar pages.

Servers based all around the world allow users to access these pages almost instantaneously. Storing and sorting this information requires significant space and both Microsoft and Google have over a million servers each.

Ranking

As SEO’s this is the area we are most concerned with and the part that allows us to show clients tangible progress.

Once a keyword is entered into a search box, search engines will check for pages within their index that are a closest match; a score will be assigned to these pages based on an algorithm consisting of hundreds of different ranking signals.

These pages (or images & videos) will then be displayed to the user in order of score.

So in order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it’s important to make sure search engines can crawl and index your site correctly – otherwise they will be unable to appropriately rank your website’s content in search results.