Search Engines: The Mechanics
Spiders
The first job of a search engine is to find your website and figure out what it’s about. To accomplish this task, they unleash an army of spiders to crawl your website. In case you’ve got a touch of arachnophobia, search engine spiders are just bits of code that process the content and links of your website.
A spider’s main job is twofold: index content and follow links.
One of the most important factors in a website’s success in search engine ranking is the quality of its content. A spider will “read” the words you put on your website and will communicate with the search engines. The search engine will use this information to determine which key words and terms to rank your site under. A skilled SEO expert will help you define your SEO keywords and write clear, quality copy that will help the search engine spiders rank you on the terms that are the most relevant to your business and will capture the most qualified web traffic.
A spider’s second task is to scurry through all the links going out of and into your website. In-bound links (sites linking to you) tell the search engine how popular you are. Out-bound links (your links to other sites) help other sites win popularity points. One of the crucial functions of an SEO expert is to build in-bound link popularity for your website. The more in-bound links the search engine spiders find, the more popularity you gain and the higher you rank.
Meta-Tags
Meta-tags, combined with content, keyword density, image ALT tags, and H tags, allow you to tell the search engines what your website is about. It is a great opportunity to feed your keywords directly into the search engine.
Keyword research and development is no easy task. When developing this all-important list, an SEO expert must help you define the key differentiators of your business, assess keyword competition, and discover which terms your customers are putting into the search engines.
It is a Popularity Contest
The last major factor that search engines take into consideration is the popularity of your website. Remember, the goal of the search engine is not to favor your site above your competition; it’s to return the most relevant and highest quality search results for any given query.
Website content and meta-tags cover relevancy. Quality is defined by how popular the search engines deem your website. Search engines read popularity through linking. The more websites and people who link to you, they reason, the high quality your website must be. A crucial job of an SEO expert is to help you build your internal links and the external links feeding into your website.
There are many ways to do this, including both the proper, recommended way and the sneaky “Black Hat” way. kRemtronicz is a reputable search engine optimization firm and only uses “White Hat” SEO techniques, which the search engines encourage and reward.
White hat SEO requires a lot more time and effort than black hat SEO (because no corners are being cut), but it also means that improvements in search engine rankings are legitimate and long term. Most black hat operators eventually get caught, and their websites can be severely penalized—even pulled—by the search engines.
Questions? Contact us for more information or to schedule a free SEO consultation.