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| How they work In the same way that you have an index at the back of a reference book or a library would have had index cards, a search engine is a tool to look-up specific information.
Search engines automatically explore the web, reading websites and following links from one site to the next, this is known as crawling or spidering. Everything the crawler finds is then indexed like one massive book of results, this is continually updated each time the web is crawled and changes are discovered.
It is certainly true that the best way to get hits on your site is to provide useful, well-organised, well-written, well-designed information. The planning and design of a web site is therefore vital, not just from a human user point of view, but from a technical standpoint it should also be made easy for the crawler to read.
Getting your website noticed by search engines There are two methods of getting a website noticed by search engines: · Search Engine Submission - Proactively registering websites with various search engines. · Search Engine Optimisation - Ensuring a site is built to increase the odds of a search engine finding it.
Search Engine Submission Many companies will put aside a budget for what is known as “paid submission”, whereby they hand over the responsibility of making sure they continue to be registered with search engines and pay for this service. A large international site will be keen on this because an automated process ensures that their website is constantly listed on the majority of search engines.
Smaller companies however are less likely to have a ‘search engine budget’ so it is possible to manually register your website with search engines. Most of the popular web search engines still provide a way for you to add your own URL (web address). Sometimes this is obvious on their home page; other times you have to drill down into the site to find out where and how to do this.
Search Engine Optimisation An insight into how these crawler-based search engines rank the results served up from hundreds of millions of web pages helps explain the importance of how your website is organised and designed.
Search engines use a complex set of rules, known as an algorithm, to rank their results, the in depth explanation of how these rules work is incredibly convoluted – and a closely guarded secret! It is possible however to pin-point certain assumptions made by search engines when it comes to finding and delivering relevant hit results.
1. Finding words within Tags Web pages are created using the web code known as HTML, effectively a tagging language used to create different effects and page set-up. Without going into too much detail the simplest example of HTML tagged up text would look like this:
<HEAD><TITLE>My Great Website</TITLE></HEAD>
The <HEAD> tags means that the words within appear at the head of the page (as apposed to the body of the page) and the <TITLE> tag identifies the text within the tag as a main title.
The outcome being that the title MY GREAT WEBSITE would appear at the top of your webpage.
It is safe to assume that any words defined in the HTML as a title would be considered more relevant by a SE crawler and used to serve up and rank the search results page.
2. Key Words In the same way titles and headings are tagged up in the code behind the website, it is also possible to include keywords, which stand a very good chance of being read by search engine crawlers.
The keywords included should be any word/words relevant to your business and services that might be input into a search engine.
3. Where and how often relevant words appear on the page Another sensible assumption the search engine makes when ranking hit results is to place particular relevancy on words that appear at the top of the page. The crawler will not only pick up on (tagged up) titles, but can in addition pick up the beginning paragraph on any one page.
Placing important information, like what your business is and where you are based, in the opening text will mean the crawler has a better chance of picking it up. This in turn means that the ideal words people might use when searching the internet will become part of the search engine index.
A search engine will also look for the frequency of words used and influence the ranking in this way. The idea being, the more a particular word appears on any one site or page the greater its relevance. |
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