THE BASICS
Search Engines Basics
The World Wide Web is exactly what it sounds like: a web linking together content in the endless universe that is the internet. Search engines help to guide us through this gigantic world, attempting to bring us both relevant and important results. Search engines do this by first “crawling” the web, then building an index of its discoveries, next determining what is most relevant amongst its findings, and finally delivering its finished work to us in a readable format.
WE’RE OVER HERE!
How Search Engines Find Your Website
The process begins with spiders. Spiders are software robots that scour the Web for words and then compile these lists of words into indices in a process called Web crawling. The journey usually begins on the most used servers and on the most popular websites with the spiders indexing and exploring every single link, leading to a large amount of Web space being explored. The journey ends in the encoding of this massive amount of data into a smaller, more usable product. This isn’t aimless, however.
YEAH IT WORKS!
Deliver Results to Users
During this search, the spiders start ranking all these words and information into a list defined by an algorithm. Words are assigned a certain weight and the more weight, the more likely we are to think of that word as a keyword. Spiders do this by deconstructing the anatomy of a Web page, assigning value to words that appear often, near the top of the page, in titles, subtitles, meta tags, and in other situations deemed valuable. This is the rank-and-filing method search engines use to strive to be both relevant and important to our queries.
Take a moment to view a video explanation brought to you by Search Engine Land a great source for search engine news and research.