How Search Engines Work?
As part of learning SEO fundamentals, it’s crucial to understand how search engines work to determine which aspects of your website you need to optimize. Take Google as an example. Before Google can serve your website to its users, there are 3 steps it needs to take: crawling, indexing, and ranking
1: Crawling. Google sends out robots (also known as spiders or crawlers) to follow hyperlinks on the web to discover new content. The content can be webpages, PDFs, images, videos or anything that can be linked to. When crawlers get to a web page, they gather information about that page and follow links to other pages. Then they report back what they find to Google.
2: Indexing. If crawlers find unique content, they add it to the huge database of discovered URLs, also known as the ‘search index’.
3: Ranking. Once the URLs are in the database, the ranking process begins. For each search query, Google has to try to organize the results from most relevant to least relevant.
So, in order for your website to show up on the first page of Google, you have to provide relevant answers to what people search for.
