Search engine techniques are a range of strategies that can help you improve the ranking of your website in a search engine’s results page. This will in turn attract more visitors to your site and convert those visitors into customers.
The way that search engines work involves three core tasks: Crawling, indexing and ranking. Each of these processes aims to provide the most relevant results possible for users’ queries.
Crawling – search engines use programs, called spiders or bots, to scour the internet looking for content on webpages. These visits may happen every few days, so it is important to keep your site updated to prevent out-of-date content from being indexed and ranked.
Indexing – when spiders find something that is worth indexing, they store it in their database so that it can be quickly accessed later by a user. They also scan the entire web for new content and update their databases if they find any that may be relevant to the keywords on which they’re ranking your site.
Linking – a search engine algorithm looks at the way that pages link to each other in order to determine what the page is about and whether it is deserving of a higher ranking. This can be done through checking the keyword density of links or analyzing how often pages link to each other.
Page structure – how a webpage is structured, including the use of keywords and HTML, can affect how it is indexed. Using relevant keywords in the title, URL and headers of a page can increase its chances of being indexed and ranked.
Quotation marks – placing quotation marks around two or more words will ensure that the search engine only returns results that contain that exact phrase. For example, searching for “social media” will only return pages that include the word social and the word media in that order.
Performing a search using quotation marks is much more efficient than searching for the words in isolation, because it eliminates many irrelevant results that aren’t in that exact sequence. This is particularly useful if you’re looking for specific information that may be spread across multiple pages on the same topic.
Finding a website that has exactly the right wording can be difficult if you don’t have access to its full URL, so it is often helpful to use a tool such as a keyword research site to find relevant phrases to search for on your own. Alternatively, it can be useful to ask a friend or colleague who knows the website you’re looking for to do the search for you.
It can be hard to understand how search engines work, but by following some basic SEO best practices, you can make sure that your site is ranked well and is attracting the traffic that it deserves.
One of the most important things you can do is ensure that the words you’re targeting are used in a natural manner. This is a vital step because it means that search engines will be able to understand the content on your site and categorize it for search queries.