The Importance of Search Engines – How they Work
March 15th, 2010
To be successful, Search engines need to provide their users with the most relevant and up-to-date information to match the search words that were input by the user. SE’s are made up of extremely sophisticated algorithms and technology which allow users to find appropriate and relevant websites as quickly as possible.
When you type a search word or phrase, the search engine will sort through the bazillions of pages it has indexed and then display a search results listing that matches your search.
These listings are also ranked in order of relevance. Inappropriate search results are useless to users if the information doesn’t relate to the search words they used, or if the results are old. Searchers (people) expect the most up-to-date and fresh information that is useful to them.
A recent survey showed that when customers want to find information or to buy a product or service, they get to the appropriate web site in one of the following ways:
- 80-90% of all customers find an appropriate website through the use of a search engine.
- About 10% they find their site by clicking on a link on another website that relates to the subject or topic in which they are interested.
- Only about 2% get to a website by “word of mouth” i.e. hearing about it from a friend, seeing an advert or reading about it in a press article.
So it is pretty obvious that it is search engines that finally bring visitors to your website and to the notice of the potential customers.
Behind the scenes – how they work:
- Search Engines use what are known as “spiders” or “robots” to create massive indexes of all the pages on the web. When you submit your website to a search engine (you complete their required submission page), the search engine will schedule their spider to go and index your web site. A “spider” is an automated program that is run by the search engine system.
- The spiders visits your web site, read the content (text) on the actual pages and your website’s Metatags (search tags). They also follows any links that your website has e.g. from the home page, they follow the menu to the about us page, contact us page, etc.
- It will visit each external link you have on your website and index those sites as well (sometimes not a good thing from a search engine optimization point of view).
- The spider then sends back all that information to a central depository, where the data is finally indexed.
- Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site at their first visit and then come back for more later. It can take months for a spider to visit (and index) every page on a 500 page website.
- The spider will come back regularly to your website to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the SE moderators – the more regularly your site changes, the more often a spider will visit.
The biggest and the best
There are literally thousands of search engines out there – large and small. Some are specific to a country and only index sites from that country, some only index by language e.g. German. Be that as it may and with the phenomenon of the giant search engines like Google, MSN Bing and Yahoo, you will find that the majority of customers all around the world use at least one of these three. These 3 major SE’s attract more visitors to websites than anyone else e.g. Yahoo, Google or MSN Bing.
As I mentioned, all search engines employ some variation of a ranking algorithm and one of the main rules is to check the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Algorithms also give “weight” or importance to inbound links (i.e. the number of web pages linking a page on your site). This ranking algorithm then decides where your website appears in the search engine results listings e.g. a position on page 1, 3 or 5,400 of the search results.
It is generally agreed that any listing after page 5 on the search results pages is pretty much useless – very few potential customers will get to that page because they will have found at least 40 other links before yours to go to.
Updating your website on a very regular basis and adding more information e.g. blog articles, will help you get noticed by the search engines. Good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques are important.
So, if you are going to sell any type of product or service online, you simply have to optimize your website for the search engines, in order to boost traffic and sales.
Over 90% of your business will likely come directly from search engine results.
You absolutely cannot afford to ignore them and to optimize your site accordingly.
Tags: Page Ranking, SEO
Posted in Search Engine Management (SEM) | No Comments »
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