How Search Engines Work and SEO Basics

Pretty much everyone using the web are familiar with search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. In this post we are going to dive into how search engines work and how to use smart Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics to increase a web pages search rank in results.

Search engines, such as Google, follow three steps to find and display results

1. Web Crawling
2. Indexing
3. Searching

Search engines store information about web pages which are retrieved by a web crawler (also known as a spider).  The web crawlers or spiders search the web identifying and making connections between the billions of pages on the web through links. After the spiders have crawled the pages on the web, the next step is to analyze each page and determine how it should be indexed.  Search engines use keywords found in titles, headings, or special fields called meta tags, to help with indexing the pages. Once indexed, all the data is stored in an index database for use in later searches.

When a person “Googles” a word or phrase, the search engine examines it’s index database and provides a listing of the best-matching web pages according to its data.  And that is how a search engine works.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process to increase traffic to a website from search engines. The strategy behind SEO is to understand how search engines work and what people are searching for in order to boost a websites ranking in search results thereby increasing the traffic to the site.  There are a variety of ways to increase the prominence of a web page in search results:

1. Cross linking within a website
2. Using frequently searched keywords and phases

Understanding how search engines work and the methodology behind SEO is the first step to increasing traffic and student leads to a TeachStreet Teacher’s listings page. In the next post we will discuss what particular actions a teacher can make to help their SEO efforts on their TeachStreet profile and listings page.