All You Need To Know About Search Engines

 

Hi! 

It's Franny again. I hope you are enjoying this journey with me? Because I am. 

So far, we have been learning about the basics of using online presence to boost business growth. I think it's important that we understand even the littlest information about how using the internet helps us grow our business effectively.

Today, we will be talking about search engines. Growing up and learning about search engines, sometimes, people were scared of answering the question "what is the difference between a browser and a search engine?" Well, if you didn't know the difference I'm here to save you. Examples of search engines are yahoo, ask.com, google, bing, etc and browsers are safari, firefox, internet explorer, etc. 

Search engines use intelligently sophisticated computer programs to sort through a massive number of web pages. A search engine's goal is to create the most relevant list of results possible to help the searchers find what they are looking for. 

Now, I'll be explaining deeply how search engines work for your business. 

Each search engine uses their own software programs but the way they work is pretty similar in a way. They all perform three tasks;

• they examine content they learn about and have permission to see, this is called crawling
• they categorize each piece of content, this is indexing
• they decide which content is most useful to searchers, this is called ranking. 

When you ask a search engine to find something, it looks through a huge list of previously indexed pages and pulls out the relevant results based on what you are looking for.

Now, with this explanation, you need to understand that when writing content for your website, try to speak the language of your customers. This helps ensure they will find your page when they search. The names/tags on the images on your website are also important for search. The search engine goes as far as searching the tag names of images on your to see if it's rank worthy. So, instead of naming an image img_001.jpg, name it hot chocolate coco.jpg, that is if that is what the image is portraying. 

Remember to use descriptive and unique titles for each page on your site right for your customers but also right for the search engine to understand about your page. I know this feels like a lot to understand, but it's something that you can do with several trials.

There is something called Organic Search. When someone searches for something using a search engine, the results page they see contains a list of organic or unpaid results. Organic results are the results that search engines decide are the best match for a search.

If you want to make improvements to your website to help it appear in organic results, it's called Search Engine Optimization(SEO). SEO involves helping a search engine organic find and understand your site. 

You may be wondering; what do search engines like? Well, simple, they like good, relevant content! 

Some people go as far as using paid search for their business to be seen. Now, how this works is with two criteria; bids and quality of content. Sometimes, good quality content gets picked over high bids, so you will have to make sure the quality of content on your website is top-notch. So, the whole process is something like this; key search words are inputted, and the search engines start looking for the website with the most relevant content for these words. Website owners can place a bid for their website to be the one to pop up on the search, say like $2 if the searcher clicks on their website link, the highest bidder gets to pop up on the search, but in some cases, the search engine can pick high quality over the highest bidding, like I said earlier. 

There is a tool that can help to summarize the search history on your website so that you can know what you are doing and how to improve on it, it's called Google Search Console. You can find it on www.google.com/webmasters. 

Google Search Console is a service that gives you feedback about how your website is doing in google search results. It has two primary functions;

• it monitors your performance in google search results
• it also shows you how google sees your site.m

It has a search analytics report. This report guides you in knowing which searches bring people to your site. It also shows you searches that are relevant to your site like "bakery near you", "barbing salon in my area", "nearest shoe store" and stuff like that. Also, it shows irrelevant searches that led people to your website. 

I know this is a lot to take in, so just take your time and pace yourself well, you've got this.

I hope you found this helpful.

Till the next post. 

Franny.