SEO: What Makes Search Engines Tick?

Thursday 11/19/09 - Heikki @Moogo

Search Engine Optimization has been and continues to be a frequently discussed issue over the Web. The fact that it's an oft-discussed topic doesn't necessarily mean that it's presented in an understandable manner. Since the basic principle behind this blog is to cut through all of the technical clutter, this post is exactly that: SEO explained in layman's terms.

If we stop here for a moment and think about the term SEO, it might seem to be an oddball. This is because we don't optimize search engines, we optimize websites for search engines.

In practice, SEO doesn't require technical knowledge of algorithms or programming, but it does include a basic understanding of how search engines work. Recognizing the importance of search engines and knowing how they work is vital for SEO. Ergo, it's the search engines that we're going to get familiar with first.

A search engine – Google in this instance – uses software (referred to as spiders) that crawls the Internet by following links from one site to another. The spiders are designed to read the content of a site like us westerners read a newspaper. They start from the top left hand corner and will read the site content line by line from left to right.

When a spider encounters a link it can follow, it will record that link and send another spider to copy and record the content found on the site that the link leads to. The spider will proceed through the site until it records everything it can find. Google then judges the topic or theme of the documents the spiders are examining and distinguishes the topical relevancy of documents that are linked together and turns the information into a database.

When a person makes a Google search for specific keywords – i.e. used cars – the spider uses the collected information in its database to present the most relevant result for the search.

The results that come out of the search are split into two sections: sponsored links and organic results. The sponsored links found on the right-hand column are pieces of advertising that companies pay for. The organic results, which are not paid for, are in the left-hand column. These results are then displayed in order according to their page rank. Page rank is a value that Google assigns to a web page based on the importance of the page on the Internet. The importance is determined by the number of incoming links to that web page. This in its essence is how search engines and spiders work together to cater to your search needs.

This is just the first in a series of blog posts, which will be dedicated to SEO. In the near future, we will be discussing the various different SEO practices, why they are important for businesses and showing how you can optimize your search engine. Stay tuned!