Brief Guide: The ABCs of Search Engines

Featured Image Caption: Functions of a Search Engine

Search engines exist to make life on the internet much easier. They sift through all the content held within the internet about a particular query raised and give the best and most relevant choices. If you are looking to gain visibility online, then you need to ensure that your online platform is search engine friendly. If your platform is not discoverable for search engines then it is not discoverable to the world. Ecommerce SEO services in India help make your platform visible to the online world.

What Are the Functions of A Search Engine?

For search engines to be effective in providing the most relevant information, they have to be capable of doing three things. First, they need to be able to search for content on different sources within the internet. Second, they have to be able to organize and most importantly store the information found so as to enable it to display it on the result page. Lastly, they have to be able to prioritize the content found based on the level of relevance, from the most to the least. This is why you need eCommerce SEO services in India to make your e-commerce store stand out.

• Step 1: Crawling

Crawling can best be defined as the process undertaken by search engines to discover updates or new content. This is made possible by the use of spiders or crawlers that use content links to discover them. The process of finding content can be likened to snowballing in the research field. Spiders will start with one link and explore any other related links in a bid to find new content. Once they find any relevant content, spiders have the ability to store it. This is the information that shall be displayed on search engine results.

To make the best out of search engines, the content you put out has to be easily accessed by the crawlers. Any form of restrictions shall mean that your site’s content is omitted from the library gathered by the crawlers. There some instances other than purposely restricting your site from being discovered by spiders that can lead you to the site being ‘invisible’.

First, you could have unintentionally barred crawlers from your site due to a piece of wrong code in your site. Second, new sites will generally have difficulty being indexed as the crawlers may not yet have gotten to them. If this is the case then it’s only a matter of time. Another reason why this might happen would be because in an effort to make your site more visible, you might have used rather unorthodox methods that might have gotten the site blacklisted by the search engine.

• Step 2: Indexing

Indexing simply refers to the process of storing the information brought in by the crawling process. Search engines need to be able to organize this information in a manner that would make sense even before they proceed to rank it.

To determine just how well the content you put out into the online world will perform on search engines, be sure to search how well it is indexed. You can easily do this by typing “site: domainname.com”. If you have a domain name such as 123dzq.com for example, to find out how it is indexed type “site:123dzq.com” in the search engine.

• Step 3: Ranking

You do not want to input a query in a search engine such as Google and get all manner of results. This just ends up being a time-wasting experience and a rather frustrating one on your end. Search engines step in to ease the process by not only collecting relevant information but by ranking it as well. All the links discovered in the crawling stage and organized in the indexing stage are now ordered from the most relevant to the least that is relevant to the query. This allows getting the right information without having to click through numerous pages.

Is There A Difference in Relevance For Search Engines?

The simple answer is YES. Did you know the number of search engines in existence today are at an upwards of thirty in number? If you ask a majority of internet users what search engines they are aware of you will probably receive Yahoo, Google and maybe Bing as some of the common answers. Of the three most people will probably start off by mentioning Google.

It is no secret that Google commands a larger market than all other search engines. It is for this reason that a majority of SEO strategies will be Google focused. When looking to make your site or other online platforms SEO friendly, it pays to give attention to the target search engine. At the end of the day, you are looking for maximum visibility.

For more accurate results, monitor your website and use the Index Coverage report in Google Search Console. You can sign up for a free Google Search Console account if you don’t currently have one. With this tool, you can submit sitemaps for your site and monitor how many submitted pages have actually been added to Google’s index among other things.

All these things are important to note especially if you are looking to get search engine optimization services for your eCommerce website.

By Ritu Sharma
who is the Content Insights Manager & Online Marketing Strategist with over 9 years of professional experience. She is currently working with India’s leading SEO company PageTraffic.

Member since October, 2019
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