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How a Search Engine Works: A Fundamental of SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an internet marketing strategy. This is in fact a critical process to place your webpage ahead of others in search engines, and more importantly, in an unpaid search result. This field is concerned with the ranking of your website in a search result since a site that is ranked higher will appear more in the hits and thus will have a higher chance of being visited by potential customers. Hence, SEO deals with –

  • How a search engine works;
  • Which search engines are preferred more by the visitors;
  • What peoples are actually searching for;
  • What are the keywords being used during search.

To be acquainted with about SEO in detail, we must know how a search engine works basically. A search engine operates through two broad functions –

1. Searching for interconnected links

Technically this function is referred to as crawling, or indexing sometimes. This is a process performed by search engines to find relevant links or sites based on search on the internet. This crawling process is performed by crawlers. Google, for example, uses crawlers or spiders to connect with billions of interconnected links on the internet and explore the sites or links that contain the most relevant information as per the keywords used in search.

Search engines collect data for your searches like image search, video search, news search, academic search etc. in an encoded format. So, these are interpreted and than stored on the search engine’s hard drive; of course a massive one that can contain billions of data. To present the data at a glance, major search engines use global data centers to store and discharge information.

2. Presenting search result

Search engines are service providers to provide you with answers of your questions. Whatever you search for, search engines bring it on in just a glance. Meanwhile, major search engines will present information that is only relevant. Additionally, you will find the search list is showing links by maintaining a rank of importance. A search engine identifies relevance and usefulness as following –

  • Sites that contain the keywords are considered as relevant. But generic keywords fail to provide relevant search results. For example, if you search by typing “ball”, your search engine might return you with links for football, cricket ball, or tennis ball etc. If you are looking for football, you should type “football” and generate the most relevant search result.
  • Sites that contain the best Quality Score are given higher importance. This quality score describes how relevant keyword and landing page are available in a website.
  • Importance is also given on popularity of a site. The more a site is popular to the audience, the higher it will be shown in the search list. The search engine might also count the traffics received by the site.
  • Importance is given on the contents available in a website while positioning the website in a search result.

However, these activities pass through some important logical and mathematical paths. Major answering machines today has developed proven ways that is productively carrying out the searching and presenting actions.

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