How is the position of the site determined in the search?

Today’s business largely depends on its visibility on the Internet. For this reason, everyone would like to know how search engines work and how to best position yourself on them. Your business depends on being visible in search engines. You definitely want to understand this thing that has so much power over your success.

But understanding how search engines work can be confusing.

How do search engines work?

There is an entire industry that is based on trying to understand how and for what reasons websites are ranked. But the information we have is also constantly changing, so this is a continuous race, but that gives everything a certain charm.

When we talk about search engines, Google is certainly undisputed on the market, so the emphasis in our text will be on it. We can’t tell you how Google’s algorithm works (no one can), but we can provide some basic information about how search engines work, which may help clear some things up. Here are some of the main things you should know.

What is the goal of search engines?

The first thing to understand about how search engines work is that their priority is to provide the best possible results for what users are looking for .

When it comes to organic search results, the sweetest traffic we can generate from the internet, search engines only care about people searching. By providing the information people need, search engines ensure that they will continue to be the first choice of satisfied users. We have all witnessed how good Google is at this.

That primary goal leads to a secondary one that brings the company profits: making money from ads. Businesses pay to advertise on search engines because they know that huge numbers of people use them every day. As long as Google keeps its users happy, they will keep coming back, and Google Ads will be extremely profitable.

Therefore, the main concern of search engines is how to ensure that the results they provide provide the most useful information for a user’s query. And that’s where things start to get complicated.

Indexing of sites

In order for a search engine to identify the right site for every possible query (or get as close as possible) it must have a record of all possible web pages on the network. At the same time, they must also understand what is on each of them. To achieve this, search engines create a huge index of sites.

This index attempts to identify and organize each website in a way that allows it to make connections between the keywords being searched for and the content on each page. Above all, it must be able to assign a certain quality to different web pages covering the same topic. Search engines must determine this based on factors that machines can measure objectively.

What are crawlers?

The first challenge that search engines have when creating an index is identifying all the sites that are on the Internet. This part of the job is up to the crawlers to index. Every time the crawler discovers a new page, it indexes it and gathers all the relevant information on it needed for the search engine to index. Once that page is added to the index, the crawler uses every link on that page to find any new pages to index.

Site owners can speed up this process by setting up a Sitemap and using internal links.

Search Engine Algorithm

The second challenge of search engine indexes is much more complex: assigning adequate value to each site individually. Given the incredible amount of data online and the sheer number of sites being uploaded every day, this task is anything but easy. How does a search engine decide which position to give to which site?

This is where the search engine algorithm comes into play. Engineers at each of the major search engine companies have spent countless hours developing a complicated algorithm, which uses numerous factors to assign relative value to sites and web pages.

Ranking factors

Although there are many different factors that determine exactly why a page will rank in a certain position, far more than we can summarize here and more than even the biggest SEO expert knows, there is still some knowledge about some of the most important ranking factors that Google and other search engines take into account:

• Links are the most important ranking factor, especially external links (links pointing from one page to another), because every time another website links to yours, it signals to Google that there is something authoritative and worthy of attention on the linked page. . Although each of the factors is important, ranking is based primarily on the number and quality of links pointing to that website .
• Age of sites – Older sites are generally considered more reliable and authoritative than new ones.
• Keywords – Search engines always try to provide the most relevant results, so they look for terms on the page related to the searcher’s queries. The more you use related keywords , the more you signal to the search engine that your content is relevant.
• Usability on mobile devices ( Mobile usability ) – Google leads the way in the use of Mobile usability as a ranking factor. If your site is not optimized for mobile use, it could hurt your ratings and rankings
• Page Speed ​​- People are impatient and so are search engines. A page that loads slowly will be ranked lower as a result.
• Data about user behavior – Google tracks what people do when they come to the site. If someone clicks on the page and immediately leaves it ( Bounce rate ), this is a signal that the page did not provide what was requested. If instead users spend time on the page or even go to different pages on the site when they arrive, then this shows Google that the site provides some value.

Google and other search engines have provided some information about the ranking factors they use, but they’re generally tight-lipped about how their algorithms work because they don’t want people trying to manipulate search results.

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