Four Functions of Search Engines
The four functions of search engines are crawling, building an index, calculating relevancy & rankings and serving results. Search engines Crawl and index billions of web pages on the world wide web, and provides answers to user queries through lists of relevant pages by retrieval and rankings.
Through links, search engines’ automated robots, called “crawlers,” or “spiders” can reach many billions of interconnected web pages.
When a person searches for something online, first, search engines return only those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher’s query, and second, rank those results in order of perceived value or importance. It is both “relevance” and “importance” that the process of search engine optimization is meant to influence.
To the search engines, relevance means more than simply having a page with the words you searched for prominently displayed. Currently, the major engines typically interpret importance as popularity – the more popular a site, page or document, the more valuable the information contained therein must be. This assumption has proven fairly successful in practice, as the engines have continued to increase users’ satisfaction by using metrics (Search Engine Ranking Factors) that interpret popularity.
What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid, also called “organic” search results.
As a part of Internet Marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, and what the actual search terms (keywords) typed into search engines are. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML code and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, also called inbound links, is another SEO tactic. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site and site content, SEO tactics may be incorporated into website development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe website designs, menus, images, videos, shopping carts, and other elements that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure.
Why SEO?
The majority of web traffic is driven by the major search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo!. Search engines are a primary method of navigation for almost all Internet users who use search queries. Targeted visitors to a website can provide publicity, revenue, and exposure like no other. Investing in SEO, whether through time or finances, can have an exceptional rate of return.
By doing right SEO, your site can gain thousands of visitors, otherwise your site can be buried deep in the search results where visibility is minimal. In addition to making content available to search engines, SEO can also help boost rankings so that content that has been found will be placed where searchers will more readily see it. The online environment is becoming increasingly competitive, investing in SEO will be a must if you want to get organic traffic.
How to SEO
Search engine optimization is a part of marketing. It should fit into your overall marketing plan. You may a very successful and profitable site using the other ways to attract potential customers instead of using the organic traffic. However, the traffic coming from search engines are highly target, it adds your income streams.
SEO is an iterative process. You do what you can, measure the results, and continue to improve. You can’t SEO a site in a day or month. As with marketing in general, SEO is never ending. It also changes daily and what works for one site may not work for another. There are many factors that determine where a page will rank in search results. The basic principles are fairly constant and building a solid foundation in SEO understanding will carry you much further that trying to exploit the tactic du jour.
SEO can be generally categorized into 5 different aspects:
- Keyword research
- Search engine friendly site development
- On-page SEO
- Link Building
- Testing, analyzing and improving
Each of the above is important and they all work together to achieve SEO.
Search is very popular, almost everyone online uses search engines around the world. To get the traffic ( site visitors) from search results pages , to be listed in the first few results is critical. Being listed at the top of the search results not only provides the greatest amount of traffic, but instills trust in consumers as to the worthiness and relative importance of the website.
Search Engine Optimization is the process of making a web page easily consumable for both users and search engines. While it is never too late to optimize or tweak pages that have already been published, it is a lot easier and more sensible to include search engine optimization when the page is first built. No matter what variables may make up the algorithms of the future search engines, websites and businesses will contend with one another for the search traffic, branding, marketing and sales goals. Learn the latest about SEO, apply it to your site, and keep testing and improving, your site will do better and better.
Related posts:
- Search Engine Ranking Factors in 2011
- How to Submit Website to Search Engines
- Link Building Guidelines: Do Not Start Blindly
