How search engines work because it is just as important as what they want.
So, how do search engines work? Here’s how it works:
1. Search engine discovers your website either via its submission form or a link from another website
2. Search engine sends its spider over to your website to check it out. Spider then saves a copy of your website in the search engine database
3. Spider continues to crawl all the pages in your website and saves them as well.
4. Search engine goes through its database of newly spidered websites and analyzes its content. If it thinks it’s not spam then it adds it to the search index. At this time, it also calculates a few things about your website such as the number of inbound links and the number of indexed pages. These plus some others are factored into the computation of your website’s ranking for a particular keyword.
5. Now that your website is already in the index, it can already be searched. When someone makes a search on the search engine, it quickly goes through all the websites in its database containing the keyword searched.
6. After retrieving the matching websites, it then determines the rank of each of the retrieved websites based on keyword placement, keyword density, inbound links, outbound links, number of pages indexed and a few other factors that we don’t know of.
7. After determining the rank of each website, it then returns them to the user.
Ok, that’s not really exact and I don’t think there will ever be an exact explanation of how the search engines work but that’s pretty much the general idea. Based on those steps, we can easily determine the important factors that affects a website’s ranking. They are:
1. Keyword placement – where keywords are placed
2. Keyword density – how many keywords are there
3. Inbound links – how many sites link to it
4. Outbound links – how many sites it links to
5. The number of pages indexed for a domain
Keep those in mind as I will be mentioning them a lot in the upcoming
days.
Analyze your Website
Take a look at your website and try to determine the 5 factors listed above. While you’re at it, you can make a search on Google and analyze the websites as well.
You can determine the number of inbound links in Google by typing link:domain.com in the search bar. That command will return all the websites linking to domain.com.