Seeing how search engines work

- If your website isn't built right, it won't show up in the search results. And so that's why search engine optimization is so important to understand. Let me walk you through how search engines work. The first part of SEO is understanding the search engine results, which results are paid, and which are from the ranking algorithm. Paid results are typically at the top and bottom of the results page, and have the word ad in the left side of the snippet. The number of ads displayed on the results directly depends on the type of search performed.

A more commercially-oriented search, like shopping for shoes, will result in more ads. While a general question, like, "What is the largest "mammal on earth?" probably won't have any ads. Non-paid results are known by a number of terms: organic, regular, or natural results. We use these terms, even though the results are generated by the search engine algorithm. But most people trust these results more than the paid results.

Now, and this is a critical concept for SEO, the search engines can only run their algorithm against websites they can find and download into their database. This database is also called the search engine's index. Search engines use programs called spiders, also called bots or crawlers, to follow links across web pages. As they find new pages, they download them to their index of information.

So, when you perform a search, you are not searching the live internet. You are actually searching the search engine's database of documents found on the web. That is how they can apply their ranking algorithm, and provide you with links to the websites, images, or videos that match your search. Because of this, a major part of SEO is to make your website findable and spiderable by the search engine's spiders.

This requires your website to follow a few principles of website architecture. First, the words that searchers are using should also be found in primary places on your website. It makes it easy to find what we are looking for, when the word we want is used in headlines and navigation choices. Second, the taxonomy, the organization of the content, should be easy to find and follow. Third, the search engine should be able to figure out what your website is about from the context of words used on the pages, navigation links, and organization of the website.

SEO can also assist the search engine by creating an XML Sitemap, which is a map of the website organized into a hierarchical structure. Top level pages to lower level pages, with links to every page listed on the map. By making your website more spiderable to the search engines, they are able to see, or more accurately, to download, more of your content more frequently to their index. It's a complex process, but it shows the importance of building a website correctly.

From proper coding, to the organization of pages and content, it helps visitors and search engines find the information they need.