SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. There are many search engines like Yahoo, Google and MSN that can be used by users when searching for information. These search engines are very helpful when a person has to search for information as it is not possible to remember the names of websites on which information might be available. The basic functions of search engines include indexing, crawling, ranking results and processing queries.
There are a large number of search engines and different search engines follow a specific criterion and use algorithms in order to optimize websites. Meta tags were used earlier to help search engines optimize websites. However, these are not used now-a-days. One is always curious to know how a search engine operates and how can it return so much information for a single word. SEO specialists understand how search engines work and are experts in this field. With the increasing number of websites on the internet, the requirement for these specialists has also increased.
A search engine operates as follows:
1. Crawling which ca be categorized into deep crawling and fresh crawling
2. Indexing
3. Processing queries
4. Ranking results
Crawling: – Automated programs called spiders or bots are used by most search engines to perform crawling. These spiders and bots use the hyperlink structure of the web for crawling across the documents as well as pages that are a part of World Wide Web.
Indexing:- After the particular page or document has been crawled, the next step is indexing. Indexing needs to be managed with great efficiency as it basically involves the use of a huge database. If one enters some request which is to be searched and if proper indexing is done the work gets complete within a fraction of second. A well indexed database is necessary so that the time required for searching for a particular type of information is less.
Processing queries: – Processing queries means to process all the requests that are entered in the search engines. When a search engine has to process a query, it retrieves the pages, documents and sites that are relevant to the query entered. There are various rules that have to be kept in mind by a user when performing a search on the search engines as the search engine uses different rules to process any query.
Ranking Results: – After the search engine successfully extracts results that match the query, it determines which one is the most applicable depending on the query. The results are then displayed on one’s computer screen in a sorted form starting from most applicable to the least applicable.
Search engines also show the ranking of a particular site. If ranking of the site is higher in the search engine, then the site is considered to be popular and is believed to be accessed by many people. If a page does not appear in the first few pages of the results returned by the search engine, it is considered to be not receiving much traffic and so has a lower rank.
