Business owners a constantly bombarded with information on how they can get more out of the Internet by maximizing their website’s ability to index on search engines. It sounds all official and everything, but what does it mean?
Search engines are how people find the websites they are looking for using search terms and keywords. Actually, the search terms are turned into keywords by the search engine’s algorithm and then those keywords are checked against a huge database to find you the website that you may find useful. The best way to describe how a search engine works is to walk through the typical process used to capture information, and then use that information to deliver search results.
Bob Starts A Website
Bob is a business owner who decides to build a website to help grow his business. He works with a digital marketing expert to put together a website that contains information his customers will want to see. All of the content, headlines, links, and page titles contain various terms (keywords) that most people use to find sites like Bob’s in search engines.
The Spiders Descend On Bob’s Website
When a search engine wants to gather information about a website, it crawls that website to pull out the information it needs. Search engines use virtual spiders to crawl all around a website and read all of the pages on that site to get an understanding of what kind of information the website has to offer.
All of the data collected by the spiders is then transmitted back to the search engine’s database and indexed for easier reference. It is similar to having a large vinyl record collection that you take the time to index by album titles, artists, song titles, and even song lyrics. When you want a specific song or artist, you can just use your index cards…er…indexed database to find what you need.
Sally Needs A Product Bob Makes
Sally is an internet user who needs a product Bob sells, but she has never heard of Bob’s company. Sally uses a search engine to input keyword terms associated with the products she needs. For example, Sally wants to buy a tablet case and Bob’s company makes tablet cases. Sally types the keyword term “tablet case” into the search engine, and the search engine goes to work.
When the search engine indexed all of Bob’s website information, it put the information in such a format that it could be easily accessible based on the keywords people use in their search. The search engine uses a special mathematical formula called an algorithm to decide which information in its database best matches the keyword search terms the consumer has used.
When Sally typed “tablet case” into the search engine, the algorithm went to work and brought up all of the information it had in its database pertaining to tablet cases. Bob’s website would be displayed, along with other companies that also sold tablet cases.
Bob Still Has Work To Do
The ideal situation for Bob is to have his company’s name show up as close to the top as possible of the first page of search results for tablet cases. Consumers rarely go any deeper than three or four pages into a search result before deciding what company to visit. It takes time to move a website up to the first page of the search results, and Bob has a lot of work to do before his company is in that coveted spot.
Search engines are simply databases of every website available on the Internet. They index their information in a way that makes it accessible when consumers initiate searches. There are a variety of ways to move a company into a better position on search engine results, and a professional digital marketing company can help business owners to get their website higher in the search rankings and seen by more potential customers.