About Search Engines
I think you must have got an idea what is SEO. Now we will move on to our second chapter in which search engines are explained in detail. In the chapter, you will get to know about search engines and how so they work. Firstly, we will learn about the technical background of Google. Now, moving to the closer look at the search engines and the most typical ranking factor to be focused on.
How do search engines work
Search engines consist of mainly three points and these are as follows:
- Crawling.
- Indexing.
- Picking results.
Crawling:
Crawling is similar to the crawling of the spiders. It means crawling the websites, its sections, content, keywords etc. by various bots over the internet. Data found over the website is done by crawling. Crawlers used to detect the numbers of hypertext links on a website which points to another website. Further, they parse those pages for new links again and again. Bots used to crawl the whole internet in a regular manner in order to get updated.
Indexing:
After crawling indexing occurs. Suppose the index is a gigantic catalog or you can say it as a library which is full of websites from all over the world. Websites indexing occurs in a very short span of time. Furthermore, every time it is changed but crawlers used to scan again. Updating can only be done on the website when are indexed otherwise they won’t get visible on the search engines.
Picking Results:
As we know that results are important for both for developers and users. As the users submit a search query on search engines it starts digging into the index and accordingly show the results. The process is about to start checking the query against a number of different websites which are based on different algorithms. Companies which are running search engines such as Google, Bing etc. they keep the exact calculations of their algorithms in secret.
Ranking Factors
Brian Dean from Backlinko has made a nice list of Google ranking factors. It’s not important that you have to know all of them to learn SEO, but you should have a basic overview of it.
Backlink profile is one of the most important ranking factors. It mainly depends on the amount and quality of backlinks leading to the website.
Some of the main and important ranking factors are:
- Relevancy of the backlinks coming to your site
- Relevant and good quality content
- SEO metrics like click-through rate (CTR)
- Size and load speed of a site
- Keywords density and the use of keywords in HTML tags, alt tags, meta tags, and page URL
- Minimum grammatical or spelling errors
- Domain authority
- Social authority
- Mobile optimization of a site
- The user interface, and more
Ranking factors are further divided into on-page factors and off-page factors. We will be discussing it in chapter 3 as well as chapter 6.
How are search engines used
Before you invest in any technical SEO, it is important to take into account the usage patterns. Do not avoid the user’s point of view for the search engines.
In the example shown below, you will see the basic steps when a user enters a search query:
The main principle to interact with the search engines is something like below:
- The necessity for a solution or answer
- Typing what you need as a search query in the search engines
- Making the first results priority
- Clicking on the search results that lead to a website
- Websites are scanned to get the answer
- First SERP is seen more. If no relevant result is found, the search query is changed.
The market share of search engines
In the given data by Netmarketshare, you can see which search engine platform is used the most by users.
Types of search queries
There are mainly 3 types of search queries:
- Navigational search queries- These types of search queries are made for a specific brand or company product. When users type for any query, they enter the name of any specific site to get its result. Talking about the most searched websites, YouTube, Facebook and Google top the list. They have the highest search volumes along with other navigational search queries.
- Informational search queries– This type of query is made when the user searches for some particular information. No specific website name is used. An example of such type of query can be, “How to make pizza”
- Transactional search queries- As the name makes it evident, such type of query involves words like “where can i buy____” or “price of ___”.
1st position ranking or 1st-page ranking?
All around the world, people update their website daily, weekly or monthly. The Internet has a new thing every single day. With new websites, changes or updates, the indexing keeps changing. And thus, organic results may also experience significant changes.
Google algorithm also keep changing every now and then. Minor changes may not affect much, but major changes may show big impacts. Hence, even if your website ranks on the top, an algorithm change can bring you down instantly.
Below is the data for organic click-through rate (CTR) distribution for April 2018 by advancedwebranking. Here you can see the importance of getting high ranks in Google.
No wonder first position is of most importance, you should also take “zero-position” into consideration. By “zero-position” we mean the featured snippets.
Featured snippets give the exact answer to any query. And thus, even the first rank results is ignored at times by the user.
For example, if you search for “how to bake buns”, the featured snippet itself is sufficient enough.
