3 minute read
Learn How Google Finds, Crawls, & Serves Web Pages In Their Results
You have to understand how Google Search works in order to properly optimize your web pages and their content. Such as, did you know that Google Search has a specific way of determining the results from your keyword search that also determines the order of the search results? Think of Google Search as an index, in which the index/backend determines the most relevant search result based on what you are looking for. There are three steps in determining these results: Crawling, Indexing, and Serving.
1. Crawling Web Page Content
Google has numerous computers whose main function is to crawl (or grab content information) through billions of web pages online, which they then program in an algorithmic process. This crawling program is also known as Googlebot or spider. Googlebot determines which sites to crawl, followed by how often, and how many pages to crawl through each website. As Googlebot crawls through each website, it finds links on each page and adds it to a list of additional websites or web pages to crawl. Any updates to the websites, such as new site links, changes to existing site content, and dead links that no longer work, are all updated in the Google Index. Please note that Googlebot is different than Google Adwords; web pages do not receive any revenue when Googlebot crawls and indexes them.
2. Indexing With Google Search Engines
Once Googlebot collects enough information, it stores the data in an online search index containing all of the words found and the web page source of those words. The information is also categorized as key content tags and attributes, such as words found in Title meta tags and image ALT attributes (two very important determinants for search order). It is also important to note that Googlebot cannot always processes content types, especially if it is from rich media files (such as video or audio) or dynamic pages.
3. How Serving The Most Relevant Result Works
When a user enters their keyword or phrase in the search engine, Google’s program goes through the index and searches for matching pages and keywords based on how relevant it is to the user’s keyword search. There are over 200 factors that calculate keyword search relevancy.
PageRank, which measures how relevant a page is based on the inbound links from other pages, is one of the most important factors. Every time an outside website or blog article links quality content from one of your website pages, your search engine rank will increase. Please note that Google does a very good job of checking spam links; these will be recorded and you can get penalized, immediately removing your web pages from Google’s search engine results. The best practice is to provide quality content through shared links on your web pages and other relevant sources.
Use Google’s Webmaster Guidelines for best practices on how to improve the search ranking for your web pages. You can also use Google’s Suggestions and Google Autocomplete to help with optimizing related terms and popular search engine keywords.
Want more information about Bing & Google Search Engines?
The better understanding you have about how big search engines work, such as Google and Bing, the better you will rank and the more organic traffic you’ll gain. And guess what that leads to, SALES!
P.S. Before you even start worrying about SEO, make sure your website offers a great user experience (UX) and your website is properly optimized for mobile devices. If not, all your efforts will be wasted and your new traffic won’t convert to sales.
