But More Importantly, Why Should You Care?
The internet is a vast and ever-growing pool of websites and even more web pages. It is the search engine's job to find and rank your website against all the others related to the same topic, so people can use the search engines to quickly and easily find information they would never be able to find on their own. They are ultimately one of the most important tools on the internet that promote your website to gain the attention of prospective customers. So it's important to understand how these search engines work, how they determine the order in which they list the websites, and what information they collect and give to the consumer who starts a search related to your website.
Search Engines and Spiders
Search engines use what they call crawlers, also known as spiders, to "crawl" the internet and, ultimately, your website to gather information to return to consumers in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The Search Engine uses these spiders to index every website it visits. This, in simple terms, means that the spiders catalog your website and its pages to determine when, why and with what ranking the search engine should list your page in a search result. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, usually called a sitemap, the search engine will record your website in its list of sites to visit, and when it does, the spider will index your entire site as it sees it at that time. Alternatively, you can wait for the search engine to find your website. However, it's good practice to request your site to be indexed. It is also good practice to request any new or updated pages to be indexed.
A ‘spider’ is like a real spider on its own spiderweb, continually scouring its web to find, catalog, and store new items that present themselves.
A search engine spider is a never-ending automated program that is run by a search engine, constantly collecting and cataloging information from all across the internet. When the spider visits a website, it reads the content on the site, including the site's Meta tags and alt tags, and also follows the links that the site uses to connect to other pages within the site (internal links) and links to other sites outside the site (external links). The spider then returns all that information back to a central database, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with too many pages!
The spider will, on what appears to be random occasions, return to all indexed sites to check for any data that has changed or been added.
When someone asks a search engine to locate information or answer a question, it is actually searching through the database it has created and not actually searching the Web, as this would take too long. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm or methodology to search through its database.
One important aspect of the search engines indexing of your website is that it scans for the frequency and location of keywords on each page to determine how it should categorize each page. However, it can detect keyword stuffing, which is deliberately inserting too many keywords in the hope to manipulate the search result. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages on the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can determine what a page is about and if the keywords of the linked pages match or are similar in context with the keywords on the original page.
The more relevant and quality content you can provide on your website, the more favorable the search engines will be with ranking your pages against your competitors when a consumer searches on one of your keywords. As such, regularly writing good quality content is imperative to building a great website that not only your customers think is the go-to place for everything related to your niche, but the search engines will too, and this will, in the longer term, bring you lots of FREE organic traffic. Having a good content writer for your blog posts is an investment in the longevity of your business. Need a content writer? Click the button below to get in touch.
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