Are you frustrated because your website is not getting enough views? Worry no more because in this article we will discuss how search engines rank websites.
The world of the internet bestows us with the power of search engines. Search engines are basically the answering machines of the web, providing quick solutions and answers to the queries of the user.
What is a Search Engine?
A search engine it methodically searches the World Wide Web to display any particular info regarding a text-based web search query. It used various algorithms to present the most useful content.
Popular web search engines nowadays include Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Bing, the first one being the most used. SEO professionals work on making your website optimum to rank on search engines.
How do Search Engines work?
There are tons of search engines out there, each of which uses a different way of working, and thus the search results of one engine may differ from the other. This is due to the different algorithms each search engine uses. In order to understand how a search engine ranks different websites, one must know the working of algorithms.
The basic function that all search engines follow irrespective of its algorithm include :
- Crawling: Searches for content over different websites on the internet.
- Indexing: Stores, arranges, and organizes all the content that is found in the former process. It creates a database full of information regarding the query or the search of the user.
- Ranking: The final and the most important step involves the ranking of the content and displaying the most relevant and most accurate ones the system can find.
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How does Ranking and Search Algorithms Work?
A complex sorting system is behind all the information displayed by a text-based search engine. These ranking algorithms sort through millions of data available on different websites in a matter of seconds to provide the most useful, accurate, and most relevant information available.
A search algorithm look scours for some key factors :
- The quality and the freshness of the content
- Relevance and usability of the web pages
- The location and settings of the user
How search engines rank websites?
Why?
Before knowing how the ranking of web pages occurs, we must know why it is done. A search engine tries to provide the user with its best and keep them satisfied so that the user stays involved with it and thus preventing their ad revenue from declining.
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How does it happen?
The ordering and organizing of search results by their relevance are called ranking.
It works in the few following steps:
- Classification: Before anything else happens, the search engine system classifies the query put in by the user. It provides the system with the information it needs for the search to occur and continue with the following steps. The engine may classify the query as a question or a query that is seeking information about something.
- Context: The second step is basically where the search engine takes into account the historical and environmental factors. They may include the engine looking for the time of the search, the location from where it took place, the device that the user is using to search the query, or whether the query is related to any searches previously made by that user.
- Weights: Before an engine starts ranking web pages, it first determines which signals and factors are the most important. It basically rules out the important factors, whether the user wants new and fresh content or older ones and something along those lines.
- Layout: The search engine finds out the number of formats that can be applied to the query intent, user searching the query, and available resources. When a query is run by the engine and the first steps are completed, it looks into the content database that is created to find the different possible elements that it can display to the user in a suitable layout.
- Ranking: The final step itself is the ranking of the web pages. This is arguably the easiest part of the process, and this further takes place in the following way:
- The user enters his query
- The engine classifies the type of query and takes into account the key criteria and applies it to check for identical previous query interactions.
- The search engine considers the user’s location and time of search to consider their motive and intent.
- The search engine utilizes the gathered data to decide and regulate which layouts and
formats to use and supplement the user’s intent.
After all the above-mentioned processes have been carried out, it runs its algorithms to finalize the searches and ranks them. The search engine pulls out all the different gathered websites pertaining to the query and puts the algorithms into work to decide what to display on the search result.
Most of the search systems and search engines categorize the results into different elements such as News, Videos, Images, etc.
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