How does a search engine work?

Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Ask.com, AOL, Baidu, and Yandex basically works as the same way:

1. Crawling: Search engines will use robots (or bots, crawlers, spiders) to crawl the Internet to discover content. The robots will visit and revisit pages by following links to other pages.
2. Indexing: Search engines will categorize each piece of content found by robots, which will be the source of information.
3. A user wants to find something, they type in a word or phrase in the search engine, which is called a Search Query.
4. The search engine will compare the search query to all the web pages it cataloged, and find the best matches. However, there might be millions of results, and how to decide which one should be on the top? That is ranking.
5. Ranking: Displayed the most relevant list on a search results page, including links to the website, titles, short descriptions, images, maps, videos, and more.

How the search engines rank pages is top-secret, but there are basic rules, including keywords on the title, the number of other websites linking to it. We’ll cover it later.

As you can imagine, the users who search for certain keywords or phrases are already interested in certain products or services, so it’ll be important to rank your website to a better place.

Of course, you need to also try other online marketing platforms, such as social media, email marketing, content marketing, etc, but you should put the search engine in the first place.

Let’s go back to the search engine, how do they read the web page content?

The search engine sees the HTML code instead of copy, images like humans do. It can see the content enclosed in different codes and understand what the web page is all about, so you need to make sure the content you provide is accurate to describe your web.

Content Management System – CMS

You can edit HTML code by using tools, the most common way is using a content management system, called CMS, like WordPress, Drupal, etc.

By using CMS, it’ll be easier to add like page title, description content which will help the search engine index your page.

What is SEO?

SEO is short for search engine optimization.

When someone searches a word or phrase, some of the returns results are paid advertisements, the rest are unpaid results that search engines think are the most relevant to the users looking for. These are referred to as organic results.

The paid advertisement will be labeled as ads.

Organic results are the sites the search engine considers as the best match for the search query, it typically appears in the center of the page.

What you need to do is let your website appear in the results, it’s better for free, right?

The actions you make to improve your website ranking in the organic results are SEO, search engine optimization.

Good SEO is helping a search engine find and understand your site, which means you provide relevant, original content users are searching for.

What is important for SEO?

Search engines have their own formulas or algorithms, that will determine the order of the results.

To rank a better place, you need to understand what is the most valuable for search engines.

The goal of the search engines is to look for as much information as possible about websites, including:

• the words you use on your website
• the keywords in the code of a page
• how many websites link to yours, means how popular sites are
• searcher’s geographic location
• the devices the user use
• etc.

Actually, the algorithms are changing constantly, so besides the basic SEO knowledge, you need to keep updating the information.

Make an SEO plan

Before you implement any marketing strategy, the most important thing is to create a plan. Just follow the step-by-step guide, then you’ll know how to create and adjust your SEO plan.

• Keyword research
• Find the website to link to your site

After you make the plan, add a deadline to each items.

Keyword research

You need to know what your customers are looking for on search engines when they want to find information of products related to your business.

• Find the keywords: You should update your keywords at least once a year as part of your SEO plan.
• Check the performance: Type the keywords in search engines, and check the performance of your website. This will help you find out what’s working for you and what’s not.
• Make a plan to optimize your content: Do you need to add the keywords in your page title, or do you mention the keywords enough in your articles? Did you regularly post related content on your website?
• Find inspiration from other websites: there are a lot of tools that will help you monitor the performance of your competitors’ websites. Keep an eye on them, and they might give you some inspiration on how to optimize your site.
• Engage with your customers: Read their comments, talk to them on social media, find out what they care about, and know the best what is missing on your website.

Link to your site

You can send some emails to other bloggers in your industry, and invite them to check your website. You can also invite some influencers to test your product or services.

Make a list of anything you can think of to get more links, and include it as a to-do list in your SEO plan.

Keep updating your SEO plan

The search engine changed constantly, for example, more and more people are using mobile instead of a laptop to visit a website, so you should consider creating a mobile-friendly website. You need to keep updating the latest changes in the search engines.

At least one time a year, checking your keywords list, is still what your customers are searching for?

Using marketing analytics, like Google Analytics, find out what is working, and what is not. Adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.

If you attract a lot of visitors but do not make sales or conversions, you probably need to add more and stronger calls to action.