Search engines utilize automated software agents called crawlers or bots that follow links and read content on Web pages, compiling this data in an index of searches.
Without high-quality content, search engines may never discover your websites or may only rank them poorly if they do find them. There are a few things you can do to make your content search engine friendly.
Crawling
Google and Bing search engines use crawlers or spiders to visit websites and add them to their index for indexing purposes, the first step towards providing results to users.
Crawlers start off by following known URLs to your site, discovering new pages to index (also referred to as “URL discovery”).
Once a page is added to an index, search engines analyze it in order to understand its purpose and rank it accordingly. This process, known as “ranking”, involves making decisions using algorithms – complex formulas with set rules – in order to rank pages according to certain parameters such as keywords (think how-to phrases, recipes or French verbs). Search engines use various parameters such as these (including how-to phrases, recipes or French verbs ) along with user behavior data in order to provide relevant results and rank them accordingly.
Rendering
Search engines work by continuously scanning billions of pages using web crawlers (commonly known as bots). These bots navigate the internet by following links between websites and identifying new web pages; then index this information so it can later be used in response to search queries.
Next in the search engine process is “indexing”, or finding out what each page is about. Unfortunately there is no central registry of websites and web pages so Google must find them through various means such as following links from other visited pages, reading sitemaps or searching popular online content for keywords that lead to each website or web page.
Not all crawled pages are included in Google’s index due to various reasons. For instance, some pages might include meta directives telling Google not to index them – this can be accomplished using either robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag tags in web page headers.
Indexing
Search engines use software programs called “crawlers” (or spiders) to scour the Internet for information. Crawlers search servers hosting websites, download web pages from these servers, follow links between pages, and add this material into a database called an index.
Index information about pages includes their title, text, keywords and meta data such as inbound/outbound link counts for each page included. This data allows search engines to accurately categorize these sites based on relevance.
When a user submits a search query, the engine searches its index for relevant results and displays them on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). It may use additional data, such as location or keywords entered to further personalize search results; keywords also play a part in this decision process, with keywords being used to select what kind of results to display before employing an algorithm to organize these results into lists for display – this process is known as ranking.
Ranking
Search engines use crawling and indexing techniques to select web pages to be displayed in their Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). In doing so, they employ complex rules gathered from their index that determine which are most pertinent pages to show for any given query. These ranking algorithms use complex rules derived from data retrieved by these algorithms in order to select those most pertinent to display for any given query.
To do this, the algorithm compares words from a query with those from web pages indexed, taking into account location (e.g. if someone searches “running shoes”) as well as how users interact with search engine’s results such as clicking links, going backwards on previous pages and time spent on each (a technique known as pogo-sticking).
Every day, Google indexes new web pages by either following links from existing pages or directly submitting them (for instance through sitemap submission).
