How Search Engines Work? 

If you understand how a search engine works then you have the foundation for getting your website to the top of the search engines’ results. Let’s take a simplified look at how a search engine works.

Crawling

Google visits billions of website pages. Google finds more pages by following (crawling) the links it finds on those billions of pages.

Indexing

Google stores the information it finds in its index. Google’s index is like a huge filing system for all the pages it finds.

Matching

When you search for donuts delivery Google searches its index for all the pages containing donuts delivery. Typically, Google will find thousands, even millions, of matches for a search. If your site does not at least contain the words in a search then it is not even in the race to be found for that search. Google must then decide what order to display its results in.

Ranking

Google uses over 200 factors to decide what order to display the matching pages. Each matching page is scored for each of the 200-plus factors and the scores totaled. The total score is then used to rank the matching pages and decide the order the results are presented on the search results page (highest at the top).