Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 by Curious how search engines work? You should be. Much of your online success depends on understanding a few search engine basics.
The search engine’s job is to return the most relevant web pages for a person’s search query. (A search query is basically what the person types in the search box before he or she clicks, “Search.”) Here’s what happens:
- A person visits a search engine like Google, Yahoo!, or MSN.
- They type something in the search box.
- They hit “Search.”
- The search engine runs the search query through some pretty advanced algorithms to determine the most relevant results to return. These results get pulled from a massive index of web pages the search engine has collected.
- A list of web pages gets displayed. These results are ordered by relevance.
Of course, you’re familiar with steps 1, 2, 3, and 5. But how does #4 work? No search engine is going to disclose their exact algorithm. However, there are things that every good search engine will look for to determine which pages are relevant to a person’s search query and which ones are not. Generally, these fall in two categories: on-page factors and off-page factors.
On-page factors are found in a web page’s HTML code. You have full control over these when you create a new page. They include things like the words you use in your article, your title tag, and what other pages you link to. We’ll go into more detail in a future post.
Off-page factors are found on other web pages besides the one in question. You have direct control over some of these, and little to no control over others. That’s right. Some factors that determine your relevance to a search query lie outside of your direct control. Put another way, how well you rank isn’t all up to you. “But that’s not fair!” you may cry. Fair or not, that’s the way search engines work. We have to play the hand we’ve been dealt. But take heart. Just because you have no direct control over some of these factors doesn’t mean you have no indirect control. Stay tuned and we’ll discuss some of those soon.
How search engines work can seem somewhat mysterious. Once you understand some of the off-page and off-page relevance factors, you can apply them to help boost your search engine rankings.
