How do search engines work?

How do search engines work?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the hot topics on the internet. It is about ranking your site to the top of the search engines so that more people visit it and you earn more. But have you ever wondered how search engines work? Knowing this will obviously help you to plan your SEO campaign in many ways.
So, this is how they do it-
Step 1-Information Gathering and Processing
As there are a lot of websites on the internet so it is not possible for staff or members working in the various search engines companies to go to each and every website and check for details so they send “robots” or “spiders” which crawl over your site to gather all the information which are then stored in the servers of the search engines. Then the gathered information is fragmented and matched with other similar sites like yours on the internet. Then they are categorized and indexed on the results page according to its importance.

Step 2-Search Engines Results Pages (SERPs)
When we search for a particular keyword then we find mostly 10 results on each page on every search engine. All the sites are ranked according to their relevance to that particular keyword. In the past, the search engines only displayed the title, description and the URL for a search but now things have changed and we can see images, videos and even maps for a keyword in the search engines. Google is so advanced that it can translate any language or convert the value of a currency in their searches.
Step 3-The ‘formula’ that does it
So, How Google and the other major search engines figure out or categorize this huge amount of data that is on the internet and index them according to their relevance to a particular keyword. Well, you must have heard about “Google Panda” or “Google Penguin”. Those are not real creatures. Those are the names of various algorithms that Google uses. So what is an Algorithm? It is a set of rules that governs how a page relates to other pages on the internet. Google Algorithms have over 250 different factors. Google’s aim is to eliminate those searches which are more interested in traffic than relevancy. So, it checks not only the quantity but also the quality of the links of any website from other pages on the internet. Search engines ‘prefer’ to rank those sites which are receiving a lot of traffic from their links on the other sites on the internet.