The Workings of Search Engines
If you feel like our candy shop scenario sounds a bit idealized, you’re 100% right. In real life, you will have to compete with other candy shop owners whose websites will show up on Google’s search results page along with your site. Besides, you’d have to do a bit more than optimize your site for a particular set of phrases that people type into Google.
However, with the right SEO strategy you can still get a decent visibility when it comes to particular customers and particular search queries. To reach that goal, you need to understand how search engines work, and how they rank websites. A description of the four core functions of search engines is available below:
Scanning the Web
Have you ever wondered how search engines get the information about web pages, their content, updates, and links to other sites? To collect this data, they use programs called “spiders” or “crawlers”. Crawlers scan web pages (and other online documents, like images and PDFs) and provide search engines with the data needed to create systematized “maps” of the web.
Storing the Data
As of today, there are more than 999,000,000 websites, which means search engines have to process tons (or, scientifically speaking, zettabytes) of data on a regular basis. To store the data collected and indexed by crawlers, search engine companies build server facilities all around the globe.
Answering Our Questions
Search engines create huge catalogs of the indexed web pages and constantly update them with new data. Every time an Internet user inputs a search query, a search engine fetches a list of web pages that contain the most relevant and comprehensive answers. Such lists take the form of search engine pages (SERP).
The order in which web pages appear on SERPs depends on the relevance of their content to a particular query, as well as other factors that relate to the quality and popularity of a website.
Ranking Websites
To provide high-quality answers for every query, search engines need to ensure they suggest original, relevant, and well-crafted content from trusted websites. To do this, they evaluate and rank web pages and websites based on multiple complex algorithms.
The websites optimized in accordance with these algorithms get higher rankings. As a result, they appear higher on search engine result pages and get more high-value traffic (rea “potential customers”).
As of today, the algorithms applied by different search engine companies include more than 200 factors related to websites, as well their content, audience, and information structure. Search engines constantly update their ranking algorithms making them more sophisticated and harder to manipulate. The list of such factors is available from Moz and Search Engine Land:
