ALL About Search Engines

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as the name suggests is the process of optimizing a website so it ranks better on a search engine. Hence, in order to learn about SEO, we need to quickly go through how search engines rank websites.

Search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing and others) use crawlers or spiders which are terms coined for programs that searches the world wide “web” and indexes the data searched. Indexing is the process by which the search engine positions those search results based on the rankings assigned to these websites.

(If you are interested in coding things, you should definitely try building a crawler. Before you start with it though, I think it is vital to let you know that this is not a general crawler used by search engines. Far from it. Google’s crawler is much more complex than the plot for Inception)

Now let’s list down all the questions that popped in your head!

Who assigns ranks to my website? How is my website ranked? What can I do to rank my website higher?

Answering the questions I asked myself ..

So who ranks our website? The answer to this is relative to which search engine you search on. Each search engine has a different ranking algorithm and this can be easily checked by searching a similar search term on different search engines. Try searching “best music websites in Melbourne” on Google, Yahoo and Bing and you will notice that the results listed on each of these search engines are not in the same order.

Does that mean you need to optimize your website differently for each search engine? The answer is yes and no because there are certain teeny things that you need to ensure to be indexed for each of the search engines and no because each search engine has a basic algorithm that ranks your website which means the basic optimization process ensures higher ranking for all the search engines.

That leads us to the next question. How is a website ranked? Every website is ranked on the basis of the relevance. Yes, it is that simple! If your website has content that is relevant to the search made by a user, your website will be listed by the search engine. The position of your website among the search results however, depends on a number of factors that lets the search engine know how popular your website is among the heap of other websites.

If you search for the most popular websites on the internet, you will find that the most popular websites are indeed the most popular websites. There is no way in hell that a website can be worked up to this list just by using "SEO techniques". This is a bit meta but it shows that the most popular websites as we know them are indeed listed as we hoped it would.

Does this mean a new website cannot compete with the giants who are popular and are ranked higher on those search engines? This is where SEO comes in. SEO as I define it is the process of increasing the popularity and relevance of a website using different whitehat techniques. And if you are a Melbourne business owner, looking for a Melbourne SEO consultant, you should certainly look up Traffic Radius and get your website evaluated and optimized for better ranking on Google and other major search engines.

To end it, the ONE thing everyone needs to ensure to rank higher on those search engines is to be honest and keep it simple. Search engines have learned the many ways used by hackers to rank their websites higher and so there are no secret hacks that will push your website to the top overnight. Hard work and SEO expertise is required to make this happen and note that Google, like Karma will reward you in the end.

If you liked what you read, you can check out my private blog at nitinkarunakaran.wordpress.com. It will not have any content on SEO though. Only gibber jabber.