Search engine techniques are a range of strategies that can be used to help improve your site‘s search engine rankings. These techniques can include on page and off page optimization, keyword research, and content creation.
On page SEO involves the use of code on your website to help search engines understand and display specific types of content. This includes things like ratings, reviews and images.
Off page SEO is the process of building links from other sites to your own, and vice versa. This is a strategy that can be especially effective when combined with other techniques, such as creating social media accounts and blogging.
Using a’structured data’ tag on your web pages can also help search engines better interpret and display content. This code is often included in the
Indexing
A search engine’s first step is to ‘crawl’ all the content that exists on the web. A search engine’s crawler or spider will go from page to page, collecting information about each one and putting it in a database called an index.
The indexed information is then analyzed by an algorithm, which determines the order in which pages should appear in search results for a given query. For example, if you were searching for “bank” on Google, it would look through the entire database of its billions of pages to find what it considers the most relevant bank-related pages.
There are hundreds of factors that can influence the order in which pages appear in a search engine’s index. These include things like the number of times a keyword appears on a page, the location of that keyword, and how frequently a keyword is found in a page’s content.
In a similar way to the library librarian, each search engine has its own unique algorithms that determine the order of its pages in the index. These algorithms take into account the popularity of a particular page, the amount of traffic that the page receives, and other signals.
It’s important to note that a search engine’s algorithms are constantly evolving and changing. That means that a search engine’s rankings will change and become more relevant over time.
A good rule of thumb is to focus on long-tail keywords that are less likely to be overused by other websites. This will save you time and effort, while making your search results more relevant to your needs.
‘Truncating words’ is another technique that can help your search results, but only if you do it correctly. Some search engines still allow you to truncate search words, so it’s worth checking your settings.
Search engine algorithms are largely automated, but they can still be tweaked by humans. For instance, if you’re a searcher and don’t want to see any of your search terms appear in the results, you can omit them entirely.
Capitalizing keywords is a technique that has been deprecated in many search engines, but can be helpful to narrow down your search. This strategy may work if you’re looking for specific terms that only have the letter “cat” in them.