May 13th, 2010 by Susie

A search engine optimization company will put a lot of effort into understanding exactly how search engines function, in order to tweak websites in ways which will send them higher up a list of search results. Although some of what search engines do will always remain hidden, with methods changing all the time and not every detail being publicly revealed, there is plenty of general information about the way they work.

Search engine companies all store massive amounts of data, which they accumulate by sending out search crawlers to study the billions of pages on the Web. These crawlers, or spiders, are really pieces of software, and they are constantly navigating the websites online, following links and reading content on the pages they find.

All of the content discovered by search spiders is analysed in terms of its meaning. The occurrence of specific words and phrases, especially those in titles and headings, the number of times they are seen on a given page, and the co-existence of other commonly-associated terms, all help the search engines to determine the overall theme of a page. Pages are then indexed, in a way which enables them to be retrieved and served up appropriately in response to users’ search queries.

Search engines use mathematical algorithms, the exact details of which are a secret, and which are constantly being refined. These algorithms are used to decide how relevant pages are to a particular search. Thus, the chances of an individual web page being placed in the search results for a certain query is greatly dependent upon the exact algorithm being used. What is known generally is that search engines measure not only relevance but also importance, in order to decide how far up the search listings a page should go. Importance is a measure of how much the page is referred to by other websites, and the more trusted these websites are, the better.

This explains why links are so crucial for SEO, as having a large number of links to one’s site from other websites which are regarded as trustworthy and authoritative should increase the level of importance and therefore the position in search results. The measurement of relevance can also be improved by intelligent use of keywords, which explains why search engine optimisation companies research and plan which keywords to use, and where to place them within the content of a site.

Search engines do not only rely on automated processes in order to come up with algorithms. Google, for example, has teams of human beings involved in assessing the results of search queries, in order to monitor and give feedback on how the search algorithms are functioning. The input of these workers helps to maintain relevance. There are also people employed to notice those sites which breach Web guidelines, so that sites which tend to lower the quality of the Web can be removed.

At SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk we have a thorough understanding of search engine function and can put that to use in creating a winning website for you.

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