How do
search engines work?
Search Engine Optimisation Explained.
In
order to understand why search engine optimisation is
needed, a basic understanding of what search engines are
and how they work is required. This section is fairly
lengthy and pretty much guaranteed to make your eyes
glaze over! So, to help you answer the question "how
do search engines work", we have broken down the
basics into 4 sub sections.
You will see from this page that we fully understand
the search engine ranking algorithm and we can create a
personalised report for you for the low price of £49.00
by clicking here.
You
can read through the entire section or use the links
here to navigate to each subsection individually.
1.
What is a search engine and how do
search engines work?
2.
How can we be included in the search engine database?
3.
How will a website be ranked?
4.
How do we attain / maintain a high ranking position?
1. What is a search engine
and how do search engines work?
Search
engine is a term given to the web-based interface
between users and search engine data bases. There are 4
fundamentally different ways in which they collect and
collate information about the websites in their
database.
Crawler based search engines (Meta search engines)
- e.g.
Google
Meta
search engines create their listings automatically by
sending out automated programs called spiders or robots
to crawl through the web.
Spiders,
such as Googlebot (Google’s web crawler), will continue
to crawl the web from site to site following hyperlinks
and will eventually find their way back to the original
site looking for changes.
Human powered directories - e.g.
DMOZ
A human
powered directory depends on an army of human editors. A
short description of the site is submitted to the
directory editors and once added to the database,
results will be from matches in the description only.
Optimisation changes made to a website will not
generally alter the position of the site in the results
page. Generally the only important factors are to have a
good quality site with a lot of content. It is also
thought that inbound link popularity will have an effect
on the listing.
Hybrid search engines - e.g.
Go Find It 4 Me
It is no
longer common for the two major types of search engine
to be combined. Usually a hybrid search engine will
offer a directory search as the main source for results
and then if there are insufficient results, it will
refer to a meta search for further listings. For
instance, before they developed their own search engine
ranking algorithm, if Yahoo had no information for a
search it will show a list of results from Google -
affectionately known as Yahoogle.
The
other type of hybrid is a site that brings together
results from many other search engines and databases.
The most common forms of these are the search engines
built into the web browsers provided by internet service
providers. They will usually use listings from companies
that do not run their own search engines but act as data
providers for other search engines. These data providers
charge website owners to be included in their database.
Bid for placement engines - e.g.
Overture
These
search engines do not require any optimisation. They
simply rank your website depending on how much you are
prepared to pay. Recently these engines have become
extremely popular. The most popular is Overture
(formerly goto.com). With these, you don’t actually pay
to submit instead, you create an account and bid against
other webmasters for a position in their index on
specific keywords. In other words, instead of getting a
higher position by the relevancy of your web pages to a
keyword search, you get placed higher as long as you
make a higher bid on the keyword than someone else. To
be number 1 on a keyword search, you only need to be the
highest bidder. The second highest bidder gets number 2,
and so on. Each time someone does a keyword search that
you are bidding on, and clicks on your link, you get
charged the amount of your bid.
Like
the other search engines, some of the paid placement
engines have agreements with other engines. So, being
number one on a paid placement engine may make you
number one on a completely unrelated engine as well. But
remember, the moment someone outbids you, your position
falls
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2. How can we be included in the search
engine database?
This is
the first stage of search engine optimisation. Search
engine spiders will visit a website to read the
contents. The spider will first of all look for a
special type of file called a robots.txt - this file
contains a basic set of instructions for the visiting
spider giving directions on where it can go and any
directories containing sensitive material or pages that
you do not want indexed.
Search
engine spiders are essentially a very basic web browser.
They read and react to the simple HTML code presented to
them by the web server in exactly the way a primitive
web browser would. Search engine spiders have not
evolved at anywhere near the rate that internet
technology has. Most spiders are unable to read websites
designed using newer technology available to the
designer today. For instance, sites designed using
flash, active pages or frames etc are invisible to the
spiders in their raw form and need to be optimised so
that the spider can read the contents of the website.
This
stage is the most time consuming stage of the
optimisation as there are many hours of research and
analysis of the site design and the metadata contained
within it. At this point there would also be an
appraisal of competitor’s sites and the careful
selection of keywords and phrases for the site. The
optimisation involves copying content from the site and
creating a new set of spider friendly pages to
complement the original site.
As soon
as this preliminary stage is complete, the website will
be submitted to the search engines and their spiders
will be invited along to visit the site so that it can
be added to the database.
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3. How will our
website be ranked?
Search
engines are constantly striving to offer the best
results for a particular search string. For example a
simple search for "shepherd’s pie recipe" should return
a list of websites offering recipes for shepherd’s pie
and not the lyrics for while shepherd’s watch their
flocks by night’.
This
basic requirement may seem a simple enough task for any
search engine but the sheer quantity and diversity of
data available makes this a very complex calculation. If
you were to walk up to the desk in a library and ask for
"Shepherd’s Pie'' the librarian would need to set up a
dialogue with you in order to point you in the direction
of the information you require. Search engines do not
benefit from being able to ask you any further
questions, nor do they have the benefit of insight or
judgment in the same way that humans do, so they have to
work out what you are looking for using a strict set of
rules known as an algorithm which is applied to the
information harvested by the spiders.
Once the
website has been analysed it will either be placed in
the search engine’s database or banished as an
irrelevant site or an attempt to fool the search engines
(spamming). Once a search engine has banned a site it is
a very difficult and time-consuming task to re-establish
a position within the database.
Spamming
is a generic term for any practice likely to corrupt the
search engine database causing a site to gain a higher
position than it deserves or to cause it to be found
under a common but unrelated search term etc. A lot of
the sold style” techniques such as hiding text by using
the same colour text as the background or by repeating
words over and over again have long been regarded as
spam.
As long
as the site meets with the current anti-spam policy and
has well optimised content and metadata the site will be
added to the database and appear in the search results
after the next update to the database. This can take any
time from 2 days to 12 weeks!
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4. How do we attain /
maintain a high ranking position?
Usually
the site will appear in a relatively high position after
the initial optimisation, however, in order to keep the
site in a position of high visibility and ergo to
increase the visitor levels of your site, it is
important to carry out an ongoing maintenance program.
Search
engine algorithms are a fiercely protected secret and we
have to attain our knowledge about the way in which
search engines rank sites using a mixture of acquired
skill and empirical data. Our specially designed
software constantly queries search engines with random
search strings and analyses the results of the hot list
allowing us to ascertain a good approximation of the
current algorithm.
One
thing that is known about the way search engines rank
sites is that the more people linking to your site the
better you will perform. What’s more a link from a site
considered important carries more weight than a low
ranking site.
The best
way not to fall foul of search engine spamming
techniques is to avoid anything that could be considered
as spam completely!
Our
philosophy here at Zoom is to set up a site with
an extremely high level of homogeny between the Meta
tags, title, description and body text of the site. This
has proven to be a highly successful way of pleasing the
search engines. Currently every client (apart from those
that have not yet entered the maintenance stage) attains
at least one first place ranking for at least one of
their primary search strings.
Once
a site has been placed in the search engine database we
will monitor the site month to month and create a report
showing how well the site is performing using your given
keywords. We will also add some tracking code to the
site that will query visitors coming to the site in
order to find out which search engines are referring
visitors and which keywords are being used to find your
site - this proves invaluable when deciding which new
keywords need to be targeted.
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Once the
site is optimised and tested on our servers, using
search engine emulation software, we verify the code
with W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) to ensure cross
browser compatibility. We then
submit your site to the search engines and invite
their robots to visit the site.
