Understanding How Search Engine Works | Basics of Search Engine Optimization: Part 2

Today we look at the second part of this series of Search Engine Optimization, where we look at multiple factors that are considered to understand the process of Search Engine Optimization.

So think about a scenario, if you are looking for a restaurant near you and you type in the same thing as a search query.

Now during our regular search we may not think about how things work.

But think about it, when you put in that search query, how does the algorithm scan through multiple pages so quickly?

And give you the best results in a jiffy?

What goes behind showing the results, and what determines the order in which these webpages are shown to you?

All this and more will be covered in this blog post!

So let's get started

Note that all these search engines operate in a similar manner, and this process can be broken down into the following steps:

1. Crawling

This is the process of examining the content that they have permission to access.

2. Indexing

After accessing the content, they categorize each piece of content into specific categories

3. Ranking

This is the process how deciding which content appears on the top, based on relevance and the kind of content the webpage displays.

Now let’s look at each of them in detail

What is Crawling in SEO?

Now Search engines ‘Crawl’ through the internet to discover content and webpages.

These are with respect to text, images and videos.

But how exactly do they do this?

They use something known as ‘Bots’ which is nothing but a short form for robots, crawlers or spiders to access the content.

So, the entire process of bots, all the time, is to just scan multiple pages, visit and revisit multiple linked pages and come across content that can be indexed on google.

What is Indexing in SEO?

To understand the process of indexing, its important to know what do you mean by an index?

Now an index is nothing but a long list of all the web pages and content that is accessed by the bots.

This list is then used as the source of information displayed on the search results pages.

So then, does everything that the bot finds online, is indexed?

No, not really, for the simple reason that there may be multiple pages that show the same/similar content, and hence it doesn’t make sense to show all of them.

Let’s understand this better with an example.

Think about a generic term, for example, a Washing Machine.

Now there must be multiple websites talking about a washing machine, so the search engine at this point of time has to make a decision on what content to show and what to ignore.

So in a situation like this, instead of taking the same content from the manufacturer about the washing machine, you should ideally create your unique content, that helps in ranking the content faster.

What is Ranking in SEO?

Now the process of ranking is unknown, what I mean by this is the entire process of ranking certain webpages takes into account multiple factors.

And we may not be aware of all of these factors, but the one common thing to consider is ensuring that your content is unique.

Another important factor is the number of websites that are linking to your page, and the overall freshness of the content.

For example, an article written in 2021 about a specific topic is likely to rank higher than an article written in 2020 on the same topic.

So that's it for this blog post, make sure that you subscribe to the blog to get notified about the next upload under this series of SEO.