What is SEO? How Search Engines Work

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. The method of optimizing the webpage is to make the webpage occupy a higher position in the search results of other search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of attracting targeted traffic to a website through the natural ranking of search engines. Common tasks related to SEO include creating high-quality content, optimizing content around specific keywords, and establishing backlinks.

Put another way:

SEO is about improving the ranking of a website in the natural (non-paid) part of search results.

Search engines are mainly composed of two parts: an information database, and an algorithm that calculates the results that return a given query and rank it. For web search engines like Google, the database consists of trillions of web pages, and the algorithm considers hundreds of factors to provide the most relevant results.

How Search Engines work

As early as 1996, two PhDs from Stanford University proposed a new type of search engine. Larry Page and Sergey Brin believe that it is better to rank results based on the relationship between pages, rather than ranking results based on the number of times the keyword appears on the page. Ranking. They call their idea "BackRub" because it ranks search results based on backlinks.

This is completely different compared to how search engines work today. Page and Brin’s search engine Google receives 5.5 billion searches every day. Or 63,000 searches per second. For each of these queries, search engines traverse more than 130 trillion individual pages on the entire Internet and select the results in less than a second.

There are many foundations behind these results. Although Google and other search engines keep the mechanisms behind search results secret, marketers benefit from understanding how search engines work. Knowing how search engines find, organize, and select results means you can better optimize page ranking.

Search engines are like libraries in the digital age. They do not store copies of books, but copies of web pages. When you type a query in a search engine, it will browse all the pages in its index and try to return the most relevant results. To do this, it uses a computer program called an algorithm. No one knows exactly how these algorithms work, but at least we can get some clues from Google.

All search engines use 3 methods to manage, rank and return search results. However, many people don’t know what happens behind the search box when they enter a search query. So how do Google, Bing, and others determine what is on the web, what is relevant to your general query, and which specific websites should be ranked highly?

There are three functions which need to be done:

Web Crawling

In this way, search engines can find content published on the World Wide Web. Essentially, crawling is copying the content on a web page and repeatedly checking a large number of pages to see if they have changed and copying all the changes found. Programs that can accomplish this task are called robots, crawlers, spiders or some variants that use "web", such as web crawlers...

Indexing

After the spider crawls the web page, the copy will be returned to the search engine and stored in the data center. The data center is a large collection of dedicated servers that act as a repository for all copies of web pages being made by the crawler. Google has dozens of dots around the world, they monitor them very closely, and are one of the world's most technologically advanced buildings.

The web page repository is called the "index," and it is this data repository that is organized and used to provide the search results you see on search engines. Indexing is the process of organizing large amounts of data and pages, so they can be searched quickly to get results relevant to your search query.

The Algorithm

Finally, we have a large number of copies of web pages, which are constantly being updated and organized, so we can quickly find what you want. But we need a way to sort search terms based on their relevance-this is where the algorithm comes into play.

The algorithm is a very complex and lengthy equation that calculates the value for any given site for the search term. We don't know what the algorithm is, because search engines tend to keep it secret to prevent competitors and people who want to compete with it from getting close attention. In other words, enough research has been done on the algorithm to allow SEO to provide website owners with suggestions on how to improve their website and SEO factors to improve rankings