What Search Engines Do
What IS a Search Engine?
A search engine is designed to search for information on the internet. The search results are presented in a list of results referred to as SERPS, or “search engine results pages”. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories, which are maintained only by human editors, search engines also maintain real-time information by running an algorithm on a web crawler. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine
There are 2 main components to Google the Search Engines
1. The Crawler (bots, spiders) go out to the internet and crawl the content they find.
2. The Algorithm, or the ranking formula, that the search engines use to determine the relevancy of your content.
.How the Search Engines do their magic job:
Indexing
This is very simplistic, but essentially the search engines, or Google, sends out its bots/spiders to crawl the internet every 28 days. It crawls the internet by following links (this can be from one page on your site to another (interlinking) or from one website to another). The search engine then builds a database containing a copy of each page of the information it finds.
How to ensure that your content gets indexed:
- Search engine optimizing your content is like spoon feeding the crawlers/bots making their job as simple as possible.
- Using keywords shows the general relevancy of your content, especially in searches
- Creating remarkable content is how others find your content, acknowledge it as remarkable, and link back to you.
- and others that will be the subject of a future blog post
Increasing prominence
A variety of methods can increase the prominence of a webpage within the search results. Cross linking between pages of the same website to provide more links to most important pages may improve its visibility. Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrase, so as to be relevant to a wide variety of search queries will tend to increase traffic. Updating content so as to keep search engines crawling back frequently can give additional weight to a site. Adding relevant keywords to a web page’s meta data, including the title tag and meta description, will tend to improve the relevancy of a site’s search listings, thus increasing traffic. ~ http://en.wikipedia.org
In summary, taking the simplest SEO steps will help the search engines find and index your content. As a result, your audience (target market, customer, client) will be much more likely to find your content/site amidst a sea of others on the internet.
This requires some time, effort and research, but the benefits are many. In the best possible world you would have used these SEO strategies before your built your site. But it is never too late! There are both free and paid plugins that you can install on your WordPress site that will help you to use SEO strategies on each post and page of your site.
HINT: your content can be re-written too!
Contact me if you’d like some help with any of the SEO plugins that are available.
Read the first post in this series on SEO
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