How Search Engines Work to Rank Your Websites

There is a very famous quotation in Digital world — “The best place to hide a dead body is the Page 2 of Google search results”. Research has shown that 91% of people do not go past page 1 of the search results and over 50% do not go past the first 3 results on page 1.

In this condition, it’s very important to get a higher rank for your website. The best SEO companies in Delhi NCR work to ensure that your website gets a higher rank in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

A bit into the history:

There was a time, when getting a rank for your website was very easy task. Not much effort was required to get a rank your website. Just ‘stuff’ the websites with some keywords, or build spam links, and whola! Your website would appear higher in the

But today, the rules of games have changed. As per the current algorithm, a website will get a higher rank only if the keywords are used in contextual manner, and are based on the relationships between pages.

How Search Engines Work?

Before going ahead, let’s understand what is a search engine? A Search Engine is a web based tool, which searches the results of a specific targeted query, and in return, it provides with a list of search results, which it feels most appropriate to the keyword. Some of the popular Search Engines include Google, Yahoo, Bing and MSN Search.

Just to give an example, the most commonly used search engine, Google receives a whooping 5.5 billion searches in a day, which works to about 63,000 searches per second. And for each of these searches, Google trawls through more than 130 trillion web pages and throws the results in fraction of a second.

The backend story:

Surprised at the lightening speed of these searches? But trust us; there is a lot of backend work behind these results. When a user enters a keyword, the search engine uses robots or spiders to crawl the Web, from page to page and site to site. The information which is then collected by them is used to create an index of the Web.

A Search Engine includes:

• A crawler which travels through every page, every website which is readable and needs to be searched by using hypertext links on each page so that it is discoverable.
• An algorithm creating an index from the pages which are read.
• An algorithm which receives the search request, matches it to the information in the index, and returns with the results to you.

How search engine works?

Each search engine has its own way of ranking website, basis their own algorithms. Since all search engines use different algorithms, no two search engines will produce the same result for the same keywords. For example, if you type a particular keyword in both Google and Yahoo, you may get different search results.

Basic Steps in Search Mechanism:

From outside, search seems a simple process. But in the backend, there is a long process that starts much before the search is made. The search engines work round-the-clock, gathering information from the world’s websites and organizing that information, so it’s easy to find.

There are 3 basic steps involved in this process — Crawling, Indexing and Ranking

1. Crawling: Search engines rely on crawlers — automated scripts — to search the web for information. Crawlers visit each site on the list systematically, following links through tags like HREF and SRC to jump to internal or external pages. Over time, the crawlers build an ever-expanding map of interlinked pages. The algorithms also dictate how many pages to crawl and how frequently.
   Tip for Marketers: Make sure your site is easily accessible to crawlers. If bots can’t crawl it, they can’t index it, and that means your site won’t appear in search results.
2. Indexing: After finding a page, a bot then organizes this content. The bot organizes this content into categories, including images, text and keywords, etc. This process allows the crawler to “understand” what’s on the page and to decide the keywords for which that page is relevant. Search engines then store this information in an index, a giant database with a catalog entry for every word seen on every webpage indexed.
   Tip for Marketers: Make sure crawlers “see” your site how you want them to and control which parts of the site you want them to index.
3. Ranking: In the final step, search engines sort through indexed information and return the right results for each query. They do that with search algorithms, rules that analyze what a searcher is looking for and which results best answer the query.
   Tip for Marketers: Search engines want to show the most relevant, usable results. That’s why most search engines’ ranking factors are actually the same factors that human searchers judge content by such as page speed, freshness, and links to other helpful content.

While most search engines are discreet about the mechanism behind it, it would be beneficial for marketers to understand how search engines work.

Every Search Engine uses its own algorithm to rank web pages making sure that only relevant results are returned for the query entered by the user. The 3 main functions of a Search Engine are Crawling, Indexing and Matching which has already been

There is no such magic button that SEO press and your webpage ranks on top. But, the best SEO companies in Delhi NCR focus on the key factors and help you get a higher rank by paying attention to On page and Off page factors. They help you design content in a way that algorithm is able to catch it and show it in search results.