Ranking a page on top search engines is quite obviously the key reason why there has been a spur in search engine optimization activities off late. While different search engines might base their results on different algorithms, the basic premise of their activity essentially remains the same: crawling pages, indexing them and ultimately throwing up results based on user searches. But before we analyze how search engines work, it is important to realize that search engines are not humans and base their results on text-factors. This simply means that unlike humans, search engines cannot recognize the intricacies of a design on the page. The Search Engine Crawler analyzes a page based on the content provided and is would most definitely provide relevant results based on the search term vs. content on page.
How Does Your Page Get Displayed on the Search Results?
Site Crawling: When you create a site, there is no way to let search engines find out about it except to let it discover itself. This process of discovering your site is called crawling. This crawling is performed by a software called spider, crawler or a bot, as per the search engine. Once the crawler locates your site on the web, it analyzes your page, follows the links on the page and ultimately stores it into its database. Here, keep in mind that considering the billions of pages on the web, it is virtually impossible for the crawler to check a particular site regularly for updates. While you most definitely cannot control the way the crawler performs, it is imperative that you know how a crawler would view your page and if you need to make changes. As already mentioned, a crawler cannot view dynamic elements, flash files, images, framed, JavaScript etc. In this case, if you have entered any important detail in any of these formats, you might want to change them to static text links that can easily be read. Remember, a crawler will never index what it cannot view.
Indexing the Content: Once the crawler explores your page, it begins to index them. An index is essentially a gigantic database of all pages on the web that is shown in the search results. The process of indexing includes segregating pages as per the keywords mentioned and content provided. It is here that the true value of your optimization process is realized. The better you optimize your site for specific keywords, the more chances it has of showing up higher against relevant search terms.
Deciding the Relevancy of Your Site: When a user searches a particular term, the search engine would check out the data stored in the database or index. Of course, there are always more than a few thousands of pages that are relevant to the search term provided. In this case, the engine would calculate and assign relevancy to each page before providing results. The search engine has several algorithms that it uses to assign importance to your site. These include common optimization factors like keyword density, content of the page, content in tags. Remember that there is no specific algorithm that search engines follow. In fact they update from time to time; it would thus do well to keep your pages updated with the latest in SEO world.
Displaying Results: Once your pages are indexed, based on search strings and keywords, search engines would display them in multiple pages, generally from more relevant to least relevant.
We at A1SEO specialize in optimizing your site the correct way so that it ranks as high as possible on major search engines. To improve your site ranking and get better visibility, contact us at info@a1seo-services.com.
