How to succeed with search engines
Search engines are an essential part of the internet, but that’s not all they are. They are also an essential part of marketing and business, and if you know how search engines work, you can use that information to benefit your own business.
How search engines work
A search engine has two important functions. The first is crawling the internet and building an index of information, and the second is providing users with a list of websites that are ranked by how relevant they are to the query submitted by the user.
Every time you use a search engine, it searches through its vast index of billions of documents and websites. Then it will return only the results that are relevant to your search. Finally it will rank all of those results in order of how relevant they are. The relevance of a website is is normally determined by SEO, which is a recent practice that both businesses and search engines use.
Search engines have changed a lot in the last decade. Once, they simply returned websites that simply used your search term the most, but now they make use of sophisticated algorithms that return only the most relevant results. This makes it much harder for spam websites to appear in the search results
Algorithms
The ranking of a website isn’t decided by a person. Instead, the engines use mathematical equations called algorithms to sort the results. The algorithms can include lots of variables, and these variables are called ‘ranking factors’. While algorithms may sound complicated, you can easily use them to benefit your business.
Succeeding with search engines
You can use search engines to boost your business and increase traffic to your website. Here are some tips that will help you to improve your website’s ranking online.
Tips to boost your ranking
Make sure that the URL for the page includes the keyword and isn’t too long.
Make sure that your keywords are not hidden inside other forms of media, such as Adobe Flash Player and Javascript, as they will not work as well. Text keywords are often the most effective.
Make sure that your website is optimised for your users, rather than a search engine. If you design your website for a search engine, it may not be user friendly. If people struggle to navigate your site then they will leave, even if it is ranked highly on Google!
Make sure that every page on your website includes links to other pages on your site.
Make sure that your website contains lots of useful information that will benefit users.
Publish fresh content regularly.