Introduction to Search Engine Optimisation

Most of us have a basic idea of how a search engine works but here is an introduction to Search Engine Optimisation, you type in your search term for whatever it is you want to find, and your search engine of choice displays thousands of results for web pages which might help you find what you’re looking for.

But have you ever thought how exactly that works? Where do those results come from? Here is a brief introduction to how the search engine finds those pages and displays the ones most relevant to your query.

How a Search Engine Works

Search engines like Google work using a software called spiders. These spiders ‘crawl’ the pages on each website and index these pages into relevant categories. Links on each webpage lead the spiders to the next page, and then the next, and the next until there are millions of indexed pages put into categories ready to be displayed for your search term.

The search engine will display the results for your search term with a title and a brief snippet of some of the text from the webpage so you can decide if this is the information you’re looking for. Sometimes the best site will not be at the top due to the Google Dance.

If you’re a business trying to optimise your own content, it’s important to make sure you link your webpages together. This should be as clear as possible to make it easy for the spiders to find and index all of your pages.

Take a look at this video from Google. He explains a little more about how your search term is converted into results. It also gives an introduction to Search Engine Optimisation:

As you can see, finding relevant results for your search query is a complex process. It takes place in less than a second, so it’s difficult to understand it all straight away. But if your business is looking at getting into search engine optimisation to promote your brand and content (which all businesses should be!), the best way to start is by learning a bit more about how the search engine works.

What did you think of this post? Are you using search engine optimisation to promote your business?

If you found this information helpful, please don’t hesitate to share it!

Since producing this article I have found another video that I felt needed to be shared on this page. Over the year I have watched and seen hundreds (if not thousands) of videos explaining how SEO works and how Google sorts the rankings. This video below I feel is very direct and straight to the point explaining this in very easy terms:

The video as you can see explains the Introduction to Search Engine Optimisation can be very simple. Although many SEO gurus complicate the Google search and SEO techniques the basics of this are easy to understand. Then you can actually start to appreciate why some websites might outrank others.

At fatrank we are here to try and make the explanation as simple as possible. If you have any comments on this please do not hesitate to tweet myself on @james_dooley. Also, comment below where we can engage and answer any questions.

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