What search engines do?

When you’ve put a lot of time and effort into your website, then you want to be found easily as well. Ofcourse, word to mouth will get you your first visitors, and please don’t be shy to use your social media to get that working for you, but a great presence in a search engine is desired as well.

Search engines are always evolving

The way we look for information on the Internet is constantly changing. We used to always look for information using search engines, but even in those early Internet days link directories (websites that would collect links on a specific topic) were very popular too. Since, we’re using social media channels like YouTube and Twitter. Chances are that you’ll find the most recent, real time, news quicker on Twitter than you do on Google.

Previously we were also only able to access Internet on a computer, but this has also changed over the last few years. You can now get online on your smartphone, tablet, tv and much more.

The way information is offered by website has also changed. Where we used to just add a few meta tags to be found back in the day, we now optimize the full content and even the structure of our website to greater our chances of being found. We’ve adjusted to the demands of the search engines.

All these developments are closely monitored by search engines, and they adjust accordingly. When you are serious about your website, it is certainly in your best interest to keep an eye on all that’s going on in the world of search engines and Internet.

The basics of search engines

Whatever happens, the two basic tasks of a search engine, haven’t changed at all over the years. They want to be able to offer reliable information that is considered valuable by their users. In order to do this, they browse the Internet in search of information they can add to their collection.

Crawling

Searching the Internet for information is called crawling, a technique fully mastered by robots now. Crawlbots browse the Internet and will, no doubt, also visit your site. When they find something of interest there, they’ll take your site to the next phase:

Indexing

When they’re indexing your website, it means the full content of your website is being searched and checked. In many cases this is an automated process, though there are still a few search engines who do the checking manually.

Read the next article: Crawling

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