How Search Engines Work

At the core of it, search engines are simply answering machines. They discover, understand, and organize the internet's content in order to offer the most relevant results to the questions users are asking about. In order to show up in these search results, the content on the website needs to be visible to search engines. Once it is visible, it needs to have clear and concise content that is relevant to the searches. Otherwise they will skip over you and move onto a website that meets that criteria. All of this falls under the guise of search engine optimization, or SEO. MSEDP offers professional SEO services to help businesses of all sizes be seen on the internet and search engines. For more information about our web and SEO services, please reach out to us today.

Our Web Services

The number for our office is 631-761-7600. When you call, we can provide you with a no-obligation consultation to go over all of our web services, which includes web design, WordPress websites, web hosting, and the aforementioned organic search engine optimization. So if you have a website that needs maintaining of any kind, turn to MSEDP. Located in Deer Park, New York, we work with many local Long Island businesses, but also expand our reach to customers nationwide.

The Core of How Search Engines Work

Search engines work through three primary functions, which are crawling, indexing and ranking.

Crawling

Crawling is the act of search engines scouring the internet for content and looking over the code and subsequent content for each URL they find. Essentially proving the page and site's existence on a core basis.

Indexing

Indexing is the storing and organizing of the content found during the crawling process. Once a page is indexed, it is in the running to be shown to an audience searching for a given topic.

Ranking

Ranking provides the pieces of content that will be the best answer to someone's search, which means that the results of the search are ordered by the most relevant to the least relevant.

All of this is done on Google by Googlebot, which starts out by fetching a few web pages. It then follows the links on those web pages in order to find new URLs. By hopping along these links, the crawler is able to find any new content and add it to the indexing list to later to found when a searcher is seeking the information that the content on that URL is a good match for. Thus, understanding and aiding these steps can help any website rank well. The SEO pros at MSEDP can help you build and grow your website by having a fundamental understanding of the core ways search engines work.

Search Engine Ranking

When someone performs a search, that is when search engines scour their search engine index for all highly relevant content. A search engine index is when search engines process and store all of the information they find in an index, which is a huge database of all of the content they have discovered and deem worthy to share with those searching for it. Once it finds the content in the index, it then orders the content in the hopes of solving the user's question or search. This ordering of search results by relevance is also known as "ranking." In general, you can assume that the higher a website is ranked, the more relevant the search engine believes that the site is to the query.

Blocking Searchers

It is possible to block search engine crawlers from all or part of your website. Or instruct search engines to avoid storing certain pages in their index. There are reasons for blocking crawlers, however if you want the content found by searchers then you have to make sure it is accessible to crawlers and indexable. Otherwise, it is all as good as invisible to anyone trying to find it.

Not All Search Engines Are Equal

There is a difference in algorithms between search engines, as well as a different in user base. Google has the largest market share when it comes to a user base and dominates the conversation. Google is really all anyone cares about at this point, despite Bing, Yahoo and others out there that are trying to compete. Some research shows that over 90% of web searchers use Google, whether is it Google itself, Google Images, Google Maps, and YouTube, which is a Google property. So it is easy to understand why all this importance is being placed on Google, which has a stranglehold on the search engines.

And you are a small or local business, utilizing Google My Business is crucial in landing business for your area. Google AdWords can also help businesses locate a customer base. If you need help with anything related to Google and SEO, let the experts at MSEDP lend their support.