How do Search engines get the information they need?
First, we have to take a look at what search engines do to get their results.
Search Engines have three components:
- The Crawler also called a Spider or Bot
- The Index
- The Algorithm
The Spider
The spider is constantly trawling the web through links. These are the links that connect pages. The spider is looking for data, content, headings and links, which contain information about a page and how it’s structured. The Search Engine Spider lands on your page from a link on another page which has already been indexed. So, if you have no external links that’s the end of it, you will never be seen.
As well as external links, internal links guide the spider to other pages on your website or blog.
The Index
The spider saves the HTML version of a webpage plus any news, images and videos and saves them in a central database called “the index”. Every time the spider scans a website it updates the index with any new information.
The Algorithm
The Search engine has an Algorithm which analyses the data in the index and determines if that information will be useful to a user. The algorithm makes this decision based on the criteria built into the search engine.
Typical criteria are the speed of response of the site, content security of the site plus others at the discretion of the Search engine owner.
Statcounter reports that Google predominates in the Search Engine sphere.
Google makes changes to its criteria every day depending on what they think is best for its users.
Many Internet Marketers believe that SEO is Dead. Traditional SEO is dead, perhaps. But to succeed you need to make sure your SEO is alive and kicking. Understanding how the search engines work tells you exactly why SEO is not dead.
