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- SEO vs SEM
- Ways to Optimise Your Website in 2016
- URLs and users need to be BFFs
- Do Do Not Not Duplicate Duplicate
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- Give Your Web Pages a Little Labelling and a Lot of Love
- Introduction to SEO Month
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- Taking It Back To Basics; Organic Backlinks
- Is Micro Formatting Important To SEO?
- Writing Good Content For Your SEO Strategy
- The Biggest Search Engine Optimisation No No’s!
- How To Achieve A Perfectly Optimised Page
- Why SEO Is Imperative for Your Business, Online or Offline
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- Mobile Internet – Internet that goes everywhere with people
- Collaborating Design, Development & Content: The Evolution of a Web Designer
- A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words: How Alt Tags Can Help When a Picture Can't
- Making Content and Design Work in Harmony
- Web Design Shouldn't Be Rushed
- The Relationship Between Web Design and SEO
- Quality over Quantity
- Tweeting for success
- How to Engage Your Audience and Retain their Attention
- Using Google Analytics to Improve Your Website
- Ahoy Anchor Text
- Navigation, Navigation, Navigation: Part 2 - How do I ensure that my website has good navigation?
- Navigation, Navigation, Navigation: Part 1 - Why is Navigation an important part of website design?
- How Important Is It to Have a Good UX Design?
- Why it’s Important that FDC Is Almost a Decade Old
- Measuring the Quality of Ecommerce Web Design
- Web Design Mistakes to Avoid
- Resizer: Google’s stance in web design standard practice
- The Future of Web Design
- Why Web Design is About More Than Just Different Colours and Templates
- Minimal, Clean and Simple: futuristic web design
- Looking for an E-Commerce Web Design Agency in Leicester? Look no further!
- FDC Studio - Web Design
- FDC - Decoding Web Design
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- Improving Website SEO using Magento 2
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- How a transition to Magento 2 can help you rank better on Google
- Is Magento 2 Suitable for Small Merchants?
- Scalability Gains with Magento 2 - A Myth or Reality?
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- Generating business through your website
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- Magento 2 Extensions that Make Your Payment Process More Efficient
- Magento 2 Offers Improved Performance - What the Hype is All About?
- Magento 2 vs. Magento 1- Understanding the Differences
- Magento 2 vs. WooCommerce - Which One is a Smarter Choice?
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- 5 Reasons Why You Should Update Your Ecommerce Website
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- Get The Most Out Of Your eCommerce Store
- Avoid Making The 10 Biggest Facebook Marketing Blunders!
- How To Use Twitter For Businesses
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15 December 2011
SEO Search Engine Optimisation
How Search Engines Work
In an ideal world, web pages would be named and organised in a logical way. Of course, they aren’t (silly humans), which is why we owe a lot of thanks to search engines for allowing us to find the information we’re looking for within a very short space of time (we’re talking tenths of seconds). Despite their unassuming appearance, though, search engines are very complex pieces of virtual and physical engineering.
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, Baidu, and AOL among the many others work by carrying out three fundamental operations. Let’s take a look.
Crawling
It’s important to remember that web pages, after all, are just files that are stored on the internet. In order for them to be found, software known as spiders or crawlers have to go through all of the files (pages) on the internet. When they do this, they read the words on the page (known as ‘parsing’); record what the words are; and where they are positioned in the file. If there are any links on the page, they will follow the link to the page it is pointing to and continue to parse that information. As you can imagine, this can go on FOREVER…
Apart from simply recording the words on the page and their position, though, web crawlers also assign value/weight to the way the words appear in the title tag, H1 tag, main copy, and meta tags. This helps the engines to work out how relevant a particular page is to a subject. Once this information is gathered, it then has to be stored.
Indexation
The information collected by the web crawlers has to be stored in a logical way, otherwise there would be chaos. This is called indexation, and each search engine has a different method of indexing content from the internet. What they do have in common, however, is a process called hashing.
This is a way of encrypting the information about the words and assigning them a numerical value (a hash value) in order to make them easier to find when somebody searches for a term. There are many reasons why hashing is used. Primarily, however, it relates to the even distribution of numbers versus letters.
For example, there are many times more words beginning with the letter ‘S’ than there are beginning with the letter ‘X’. If the words were indexed according to alphabetical order, it would take much longer for the search engine to go through all the indexes relating to words beginning with ‘S’. With numbers, however, a 10-digit code would have an even distribution of numbers, and therefore all stored words should, theoretically, take the same amount of time to be retrieved from the index. What’s more, because the number is stored in a hash table along with a pointer to the actual information, the information recorded by the web crawlers can be stored in a very efficient way whilst remaining separate.
For professionals working in search engine optimisation, their job is to try to understand, through observation and testing, how each search engine values and assigns weight to all of the variables on a web page, and then optimise pages accordingly so that they are indexed as effectively and accurately as possible. If you ever hear someone refer to The Algorithm with worshipful reverence, they’re referring to Google’s infamously top-secret search calculations.
Returning Results
When a user searches for a term, the search engine will go through its indexes and look for the most appropriate results. For instance, if I type, “how do search engines work” into Google, the search engine will look for all the results which have this sequence of words together or are in close proximity to each other, e.g.
How AND do AND search AND engines AND work
As you can imagine, on their own these words do not carry much meaning, and using Boolean operators such as “AND” to build a longer search query is a very simplistic way of finding information on the internet, which is why search engines are now moving towards more conceptual-based ways of indexing information. For example, this means that search engines are able to use geographical information, natural language recognition, and personal information to try to understand the meaning/context behind a particular search. This helps when there is ambiguity. For instance, if you search for “sun bed”, it is unlikely you are looking for somewhere for our planet’s biggest star to sleep.
The order in which results are returned depends on several factors:
- How the query is structured
- How well a webpage is optimised
- Your location
- The quality of the links pointing to a webpage
- The relevancy of the anchor text of the links pointing to the page
- A lot more that keep SEOs on their toes
The Future of Search
With the advent of HTML5, we expect to see an increasing relationship between social networking profiles and the way content on the web is
prioritised. In particular, this will be helped along by the advent of the rel=author and rel=publisher tags which allow content creators to indicate to search engines the origins of a page’s content. Theoretically, if you are an influential social media user and your author details are attributed to a particular page, it could well help a page rank highly. The likes of social influence monitoring sites like Klout, therefore, will undoubtedly play a more prominent role in the way we approach search engine marketing and social media over the next year.
It seems impossible to talk about search engines without delving into the realm of search marketing. If you have any thoughts on the future of search; further information to add to this post; or want to give us a HIGH FIVE, leave a comment or chat with me on Twitter.
Topics
Latest blog
- 3 Big SEO Mistakes That Is Limiting Your Marketing Efforts
4th April 2017
- Is SEO Really Important for Your Business?
4th April 2017
- Why Your Web Design Needs To Have CRM Integration
10th February 2017
- Updating Patches for Web Domain Security
25th January 2017
- How to Integrate Linnworks with Magento 2 Ecommerce Platforms
11th January 2017
Archive
SEO Search Engine Optimisation(8)
-
2017(1)
-
2016(2)
March(11)
- What is robots.txt and how can it help with SEO?
- Why what you do for Google helps with Yahoo
- Google’s Research Tools to Find the Right Keywords for SEO
- International SEO at a Glance Part 1
- SEO vs SEM
- Ways to Optimise Your Website in 2016
- URLs and users need to be BFFs
- Do Do Not Not Duplicate Duplicate
- What are Meta Description Tags and How to Use Them Effectively?
- Give Your Web Pages a Little Labelling and a Lot of Love
- Introduction to SEO Month
February(1)
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2015(1)
-
2014(4)
-
2013(4)
May(1)
March(7)
February(10)
- SEO & PPC – A Winning Combination
- Video Marketing Strategy And Your SEO Campaign
- Boost Your Rankings With On-Page SEO
- Let Quality Content Boost Your Rankings
- Taking It Back To Basics; Organic Backlinks
- Is Micro Formatting Important To SEO?
- Writing Good Content For Your SEO Strategy
- The Biggest Search Engine Optimisation No No’s!
- How To Achieve A Perfectly Optimised Page
- Why SEO Is Imperative for Your Business, Online or Offline
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- The Top Image File Formats for Web Design
- The Best Web Design Tactics You Can Use
- Web Design Tips and Tricks
- Attention Leicester Businesses
- Mobile Internet – Internet that goes everywhere with people
- Collaborating Design, Development & Content: The Evolution of a Web Designer
- A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words: How Alt Tags Can Help When a Picture Can't
- Making Content and Design Work in Harmony
- Web Design Shouldn't Be Rushed
- The Relationship Between Web Design and SEO
- Quality over Quantity
- Tweeting for success
- How to Engage Your Audience and Retain their Attention
- Using Google Analytics to Improve Your Website
- Ahoy Anchor Text
- Navigation, Navigation, Navigation: Part 2 - How do I ensure that my website has good navigation?
- Navigation, Navigation, Navigation: Part 1 - Why is Navigation an important part of website design?
- How Important Is It to Have a Good UX Design?
- Why it’s Important that FDC Is Almost a Decade Old
- Measuring the Quality of Ecommerce Web Design
- Web Design Mistakes to Avoid
- Resizer: Google’s stance in web design standard practice
- The Future of Web Design
- Why Web Design is About More Than Just Different Colours and Templates
- Minimal, Clean and Simple: futuristic web design
- Looking for an E-Commerce Web Design Agency in Leicester? Look no further!
- FDC Studio - Web Design
- FDC - Decoding Web Design
- Predicting Web Design Trends in 2016
- The Do’s and Don’ts of Ecommerce: how to make your online business succeed
- What Makes Web Design Great?
- Web Design for Leicester-based business Dustraction by FDC
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- Top 4 Benefits of Magento 2 to make shopping carts
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- The power of Magento 2 as a Catalogue Management Tool
- The Top 4 Advantages of Magento 2 for Web Developers
- The need for effective E-commerce Platforms
- The flexibility of Magento 2 for Creating Mobile Apps
- Magento 2-The best Content Management System
- Magento 2 Perks for a winning E-commerce solution
- Magento 2 offers amazing Online stores
- Magento creates the best web customisations
- Improving Website SEO using Magento 2
- How to use Maegento 2 to create the best shopping websites
- How to select the best Magento 2 Web Designs
- How to create an engaging E-commerce website with Magento 2
- Creating Beautiful Stores with Magento 2
- Best 5 Features of Magento 2 as a CMS
- Employing Magento 2 for empowering Affiliate Marketing
- 4 E-commerce stores that have successfully migrated to Magento 2.0
- How to Manage High E-commerce Traffic with Magento 2
- How a transition to Magento 2 can help you rank better on Google
- Is Magento 2 Suitable for Small Merchants?
- Scalability Gains with Magento 2 - A Myth or Reality?
- The 4 Best Features of Magento 2 That Make It the Best E-Commerce Platform
- What Makes Magento 2 a Robust E- Commerce Platform for B2B Businesses?
- Generating business through your website
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- 4 Magento 2 Extensions That Can Reduce Your Cart Abandonment Rate
- 6 Reasons You Should Move to Magento 2
- Affiliate Marketing Made Easier with Magento 2
- How to Migrate Seamlessly from Magento 1 to Magento 2?
- Magento 2 Extensions that Make Your Payment Process More Efficient
- Magento 2 Offers Improved Performance - What the Hype is All About?
- Magento 2 vs. Magento 1- Understanding the Differences
- Magento 2 vs. WooCommerce - Which One is a Smarter Choice?
- The Four Best Magento 2 Themes for Fashion Stores
- Understanding the Tech Stack of Magento 2
- Why Magento 2 is Likely to Win against Shopify in the E-Commerce Battle?
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- Is the old way to sell the new way to sell?
- How Magento Can Benefit Your Business
- Compete With the Big Boys with Magento
- Magento: Amazon and eBay Integration
- Magento – Making E-Commerce Easy
- Small Tweaks To Increase Your eCommerce Website Conversion Rates
- 5 Reasons Why You Should Update Your Ecommerce Website
January(6)
- The Complete Package: Get the E-Commerce Website Your Business Deserves
- Climb the Ranks – How SEO Can Increase Business Profits
- Commerce Made Easy with Magento
- Stand Out – Why a Customized Website is Invaluable to Your Business
- Stay in Control – An Integrated Website to Optimize Business Performance
- Effectively Market and Grow Your Business in 2016
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- How to Use Raven Tools to Effectively Manage SEO and Social Media
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- Google Merchant Centre – Perfect for E-Commerce Solutions Part 1
- Google AdWords the Basics Part 2
- Google AdWords the Basics Part 1
- Google Webmaster as an effective tool – Part 2
- Google Webmaster as an effective tool – Part 1
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- How Google works as a Search Engine
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- Are You Missing Out On Vital Marketing Opportunities?
- How To Attract The Female Audience
- Is Your eCommerce Site Designed Around Your Customers?
- Get The Most Out Of Your eCommerce Store
- Avoid Making The 10 Biggest Facebook Marketing Blunders!
- How To Use Twitter For Businesses
- Is Your Business Making The Most Out Of Google+?
- Google+ State That There Is No Concern Regarding Facebook Search Tactics
- Boosting Lead Nurturing Campaigns
- Embrace Open-Source Marketing
-
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- E-marketing Campaigns: How to Win the Rat Race
- The Golden Rules of Selling Through Your Website
- Generate Cash Without Having to Do a Thing - Here's How
- The 10 Biggest Branding Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
- The Seven Key Considerations of Branding
- Dale Shows You How to Cash in On Your Website
- eCommerce: Have You Done Your Homework
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