How SEO Works?

How Google Search Engine Works?

First you need to understand what is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? SEO is a process of ranking your website on a Search Engine. As of now Google is a major search engine globally. In this article we will talk about “How SEO Works” or you can say “How Search Engine Works”. Search Engine Optimization is a part of Digital Marketing activities to promote a website and it’s content.

A Search Engine is a fully automated software which uses a program called “Crawlers”. A crawlers works 24*7 to find new and updated web pages to add in its “Index” (indexing system).

Note:- Search Engines does not accept the payment to crawl a website or rank higher on Search Engine Results.

There are three main stages of SEO / Search Engine.

The entire SEO process works around these below mentioned 3 stages and the stages define which web page is eligible to rank on Search Engine Result Pages. Here, we are giving the example of Google Search Engine and will discuss these stages in details:

1. Crawling:- Crawling : The Search Engine’s automated program, which is called crawler (also known as googlebot, robot, spider, or bot.), fetches (download) the text, images and videos from web pages which are found on servers/internet. This process is called Crawling.

2. Indexing:- Google Search Engine analyses this fetched data (text, images and video) from web pages and stores entire information in Google Index (a large database).

3. Serving Search Results:- After analysis Google displays the information on its Search Engine (google.com) when a user searches for something on Google. The Search Engine displays the information which is relevant to the user’s search.

Now we are going to discuss all these three stages in details:-

Crawling

There is no central or single place where all the web pages around the world and on the internet can be found at once. This is the reason that Google Search Engine’s crawler keeps crawling on the servers 24*7 globally to find new and updated web pages. Google’s crawler adds these new and updated web pages in the list of known pages and this process is called URL Discovery. Once Google finds a new or updated URL then the crawler visits the page to find out what’s new there. Google uses an algorithm which defines the process of crawling means when and how a URL should be crawled. The Crawler does not crawl all the web pages due to many reasons such as the crawler may be restricted on a page by the owner or the page may be accessible after login only. Crawling totally depends on the accessibility of a website by the crawler.

Indexing

Once the crawling process is done then Google analyses the crawled page and learns about the page’s content. Google tries to understand the content, tags, images and video of that crawled page and this process of understanding a page is called Indexing. In this process of indexing Google determines whether a page is a duplicate of another webpage or this is canonical? Canonical is another version of any website with the same content. Both the pages (original & canonical) are saved in the database and it is decided which one needs to serve in search results just before a Search happens by any users. Showing a page in Search Results depends on many factors such as device, location, context, language, and more. All the understandings, analysis of a page is stored in Google’s Index and all this information is used to determine the ranking of that page on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP).

Serving Search Results

Whenever any user searches for something on Google or inserts any query (keywords) in the search bar, Google’s software finds the relevant and high quality web pages from Index and returns them in Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). For example when a user searches for “What is SEO” then Google’s algorithm calculates ranking and will display web pages which contain the information related to “What is SEO” as per calculated ranking. It’s not necessary that all the indexed pages will be displayed on Search Result on each search query (keywords).

In the image below you can see that Google’s algorithm calculated the ranking as 1st ranking is given to moz.com, 2nd ranking given to semrush.com and 3rd ranking mailchimp.com. This ranking is decided by the Algorithm based on thousands of ranking factors.

After learning about the search engine working process, you must get to know how to get your website on Google Search Engine to rank your website. If you want to see your website on Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERP), you must have the next level of SEO knowledge.