It is really important that readers understand this, if they are going to start a SEO campaign for their company or business. There is much confusion in SEO land and if punters can differentiate between SEO companies and what they are offering, then they are less likely to be ripped off as you will have a thorough and clear understanding of the logic behind SEO.
Please continue to read on for a clearer pathway and enlightenment to the many whys and hows regarding search engines and SEO.
Question # 1 What is a Search Engine?
Basically, a search engine is a technique that allows spiders or crawlers to trawl the entire website looking for information, web files, images, videos, anything that is detectable and readable online. When a new published document has been crawled by a search engine it becomes indexed online and this is referred to as the process of caching. These documents that are stored are then ranked in order of what the search engines deem relevant and ranked in order in its SERPS’s or search engine results page.
The best way to get a site indexed is to have a link from another site pointing to the new page. This will trigger a alert for the spiders that there is a page to be indexed and cached. Depending on the relevance of the external page, will determine your SERP. The higher this page, the greater the value search engines will place on your site.
New sites can also be introduced to bots ( these are search bots that are waiting for signals to index a new page) by the introduction of a sitemap or robot.txt files that can be added to each page. In truth, I have launched a new WordPress site and it has been indexed by the bots in less than 24 hours. If you look at the Sydney Morning Herald website, you can see this as a perfect example. They can launch a new site and it will be indexed and displayed within minutes. This is because the main SMH site is constantly changing content which is triggering the search engines to keep trawling the site for new content. Ultimately, for your business this means that you should be updating your pages regularly. This will keep the search engines interested in your site and in turn every time you update or upload a new page, it will be indexed.
QUESTION # 2 What is indexing?
One a website document or page has been located by the crawlers, this data is stored on the search engines database so that the information can be displayed when a online user makes a search inquiry.
The immense marketing power of this has led to the rise of the SEO industry where businesses are wanting to be the first thing people see when this search inquiry is made. The order of how your business will rank depends really on the capabilities of the SEO company you work with. Working out the engines algorithm ranking rules is the battle as these are very complex and always changing. What ranks a site one day may not necessarily work for the next day. This is the tricky part, but overall, if you work on the philosophy that you should be working on an organic and natural approach to your online marketing, then you should be ranking very well.
In summation, indexing is there to make certain that questions asked are speedily answered as quickly as possible. In most cases in less than half a second!
QUESTION # 3 What is the most popular search engine?
By far the biggest is Google. In Australia over 95% of online searches are conducted using this search engine.
The second is Bing, but to me this is just a formality. I have never in my 16 years of working in this industry ever once had anyone want to rank on Bing. Basically, if it never existed it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. In fact, Google has sucked up all the directories condensed it into one small search bar.
Again, this is only for Australia. I know in Europe and the US the same holds true. But, in China and other emerging countries they have their own search engine preferences.
Why should I worry myself about how a search engine works?
If you have a business or are a company that relies on getting traffic through to your site then this is a very crucial question. We live in an era that is evolving and changing at a very fast pace. This means that if you are not up to speed with the machinations of the search engine environment then you are going to be in big trouble. Forget about traditional marketing. This has been dead and buried for well over 5 years now and the new kid on the block is Google and Facebook; which like a search engine is called a social media platform. I wont touch on this now but if you are reading this I strongly urger you to contact me on 1300 885 375 so we can go over this in detail. Your website must appear highly on the SERP’s.
Why is Search engine optimisation an ongoing and committed investment?
As discussed above, what we do for your company with SEO has shifted considerable over the past 2 years. For any marketing person working on their SEO, they would be aware that Google makes at least 2 changes to it’s algorithm daily. Credible, SEO companies are always working on these changes, keeping up to speed on what they might be doing and making the necessary adjustments to compensate for any new trends that may emerge. Point to note is the Penguin + Panda updates made by Google that caught most people off guard. This is what you pay for. That is the responsibility of getting your site high up inn the SERP’s and then minimising any potential fluctuations in these rankings.
A lot of businesses think that if they are ranking, then they can stop the SEO. This is massive over sight and who ever gave them this impression is sorrily mistaken. SEO is a process that needs to be continually managed. Hence the constant fee.
OK so you no have a better and clearer insight into how a search engine works, you should be smart and take the next contact a SEO Company Sydney professional like us at Hopping Mad Designs. You will find:
• What your major competitors are doing and how they are doing it. Always nice to know!
• What plan of action we will take to beat them. This is the fun part.
• How to drive more traffic to your website and get more inquiries.
• How to turn those visitors into paying customers.
• PLUS heaps more!