How Internet Searches work | Digital Marketing Consultant
How Internet Searches work | Digital Marketing Consultant
While most of people now who are operating their business, small to large understand they need to market online, not all of them understand what it takes, not all of them will give you their businesses unless you explain how the internet works, why they should embrace, and why they are not performing.
There are times when every business thought that to be able to get customers online they needed just a website, were they wrong?? To a certain degree they actually are. No one of course had educated them and a result there were millions of websites of the same niches competing for sales and the search engines had no clear formula on how to bring relevant results, hence internet was once labeled as a place where you can’t get real and trusted information, as even the website with irrelevant information would show up on front pages.
This changed, the user became the main focus for search engines, then started showing relevant information for every query a person requested. It’s no wonder, now internet is the most trusted source, unless someone can’t use it properly.
So how internet searches work| Digital marketing consultant
To get any results on internet, we use the search engines by typing in what we call keywords for example “Chinese restaurant in London”. Search engines are responsible for searching the whole World Wide Web and bring answers for specific queries we have requested. The search engines then have two main functions then: To crawl and index all the documents/information on World Wide Web and bring answers to the users.
Crawling and indexing the web |How internet searches work
The first function of search engines is crawling the whole web and index all the information. This process is one of the biggest the search engines has to take as you know we get billions of content in both mediums (videos, images, audio and plain texts) every year, and as you already know nothing ever get lost on internet, so the internet has all the information that has ever put, when the crawling process begins, the crawlers commonly known as robots passes through all information and index them for personal use, when the time comes.
The Crawlers are like spiders, to be able to crawl have specific web/ network of routes where they operate through, so to be able your content anywhere in the web should be connected to these route networks.
The whole World Wide Web is therefore built on link networks. I guess many of us have heard something about links, have heard why digital marketers will tell you we need to create citations and links from multiple reliable sites to link to us, it’s no wonder, Search Engine Optimization is much reliant on link building, of course both quantity but quality link building.
It’s the main reason we have heard that the search engine bots won’t crawl our new websites if we have no links or any website linking to our new built one, it’s not just a website, but it needs a perfectly crawled and indexed authority website to link to us, then we are interconnected within a network of billions of documents on the web.
After the search engines have crawled the pages and all documents, they store the pieces of information in their massively developed database that will be recalled later when needed by a user (when someone searches). You may be wondering why you always get results in fraction of seconds, but the real reason behind is that, the results we always get is just a copy of an indexed webpage which keep updated every time.
The Search Engine companies, to be able to index the information and store them from all web, they have built massive storage facilities, of course the facilities that have massive computing machines that process large quantities of information very quickly as the companies understand that the users are impatient, a delay of even a second will result into mistrust of the search engine.
Bring relevant answers to the user | Digital marketing consultant
The Search Engines after crawling and indexing the webpages, they have one last big task; to bring relevant answer. So we may say as we perform calculations on a calculator, you expect right answer, so is the search engines, we expect accurate answer.
When we search, the search engines have to find the relevant results, and then rank the results according to the popularity of websites with relevant information. The search engines find many websites and webpages that have relevant information but the display place is so limited, so they can’t list all of them, hence they provide a list basing on what they think have more reputation and are more popular.
So how search engines determines the relevance and popularity
Gone are the days where everyone tried to fool the search engines by stuffing the keywords to make our sites look relevant to what the people search. Then came the time when everyone started writing articles, but then the internet became flooded with contents, how will yours come first?
There are hundreds of variables that influence the ranking; these are algorithms that calculate all factors to determine the relevance then the popularity within just a fraction of seconds.
Here below I will just highlight the ranking factors that many search engine use, of course these are the factors that may make your website or webpage rank better, or become popular through processes that take time as well. These factors are partly undisclosed by search engines, as they normally provide basic guidelines for a better crawled site, but not for ranking on top pages.
Here are major search engines guidelines | Digital marketing consultant
- Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
- Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
- Use keywords to create descriptive, human-friendly URLs and ensure a clean, keyword rich URL structure is in place.
- Make sure content is not buried inside rich media (Adobe Flash Player, JavaScript, Ajax)
- Provide one version of a URL to reach a document, using 301 redirects or the rel=”canonical” attribute to address duplicate content.
After all, every websites can do all the above, so it does not make anyone stand out as having the relevant information the one is using, nor they don’t make your website popular.
What make your website relevant and popular? How Internet Searches work
- Domain Level Features (Link and citations, trust, domain age, etc)
- Page Level Link Features (page rank, links to the page, anchor text distribution, quality)
- Page Level Keyword and Content based features (on page optimization of keyword usage, content quality, quantity and relevance, content sharing on the web)
- Page Level Keyword- Agnostic Features (Content length, uniqueness, readability, load speed, structural data markup etc)
- Engagement & Traffic features (usage signals, quantity, and diversity, CTR of queries both on the domain and page level)
- Domain Level Brand Metrics (Offline popularity, brand and domain mentions in all mediums, toolbar/browser data of site usage etc)
- Domain Level Keyword Usage (Exact-match keyword domains, partial-keyword matches etc)
- Domain Level Keyword – Agnostic Features (Domain name length, TLD extension, SSL Certificates)
- Page-Level Social Metrics (Quantity/quality of tweeted links, Facebook shares, Google+ to the page etc.)
(https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors )
To be able to rank perfectly then any website needs to be relevant to the user query but also be popular among the competitors who all are relevant, the ranking factors are mostly divided into sub groups; On Page optimization, Off Page Optimization, Social signals (All media included) and of course the chance that a website provides the users with great answers whenever they visit.
In the coming posts, I will be explaining the ranking factors, will be explaining the authority websites and how to become, will also explain when to expect to become the authority online, and what to expect when you take your business online.
As we have seen above its clearly two things are the main factors for a better ranking, and those two factors are the basis why we do see an internets as a source of reliable information and all answers we need, also the same two factors are the biggest consideration when the search engines have to bring answers; Relevancy and Popularity of a particular page among billions competitors.
In summary of a whole post; there are billions of pages/documents/pdf/videos/audio or any other kind of information nature online. Those documents are all interconnected in a web like spider web that helps the search engine crawlers (bots) to access them and index them for uses…this is done by the help of links, if the page is solely not linked anywhere, it can never get accessed.
When the bots crawl the documents, they store them for uses until someone requests them, but as long as there great similar, relevant answers to every question (queries), the search engine will provide answers in a list by ranking according to what they think are more popular, of course here the search engine apply their mathematical equations (algorithms) to determine the relevance and popularity.
It’s no wonder websites like Wikipedia appears mostly on every page if you are searching specific things, and once you open it you will see hundreds of links, hope now you understand why they rank on top, as they might not be the most relevant information of all, but how many can beat Wikipedia on popularity and number of links?? Today as I write this, their Alexa ranking is 7 with more than twelve million backlinks.
As we are waiting for another post on series of this particular topic, digital marketing, you can access Digital marketing consultant where there is great digital marketing resources for everyone, and do provide a digital marketing course for businesses with full hands-on support.
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Senior Consultant at colmmcgill.com