How Do Search Engines Work?

Search engines make the web accessible to us all, making sense of the millions of pages that are available at any given time.

The people who run search engines are constantly making changes to the way they work in an effort to make results more relevant and to remove spam, to ensure that you return to their service the next time you want to find something.

But how do they match relevant sites to your query in a matter of milliseconds?

 

Here we will give you an overview of how they work and how you can use a good link building service to your advantage.

The biggest search engines, like Google and Bing, use programs known as ‘spiders’ that constantly ‘crawl’ the web, using links to move between pages and indexing the results so that you can access them quickly. The information is compressed and stored so that it can be quickly accessed when it is needed, allowing you to get quick results from their index rather than going through the whole web each time.

"A189% increase in traffic from social media platforms, a 219% increase in revenue and a 102% increase in traffic"

Social media used to be a ‘nice’ add-on to a digital marketing strategy; a way of showing consumers you’re a brand with its finger on the pulse. But 2011 marks the year when social media has shifted from being nice to essential.

In May 2010, the overall visits to social networking sites took over the overall number of visits to Search Engines, clearly highlighting the reason why brands should be actively integrating this channel into their overall marketing strategy.
Social media’s public involvement means it’s a fantastic channel for market and product research and an ideal space for improving customer service, but it's also an excellent way to add variation to link portfolios and turns the public themselves into handy link builders.

By adding social functionality to share this linkbait, with the likes of Tweet functionality, and Facebook Likes, the content can travel further through a multitude of users and followers. Usually this is much further than could be achieved through solely trying to link to the content or placing it on a blog.

Social elements play a huge part in the traffic generated, but also add to the fact that these citations and “votes” in the form of Tweets and Likes go a long way to indicating to search engines that this content has value and deserves to rank for relevant keywords.

Want improved bottom line results May - Nov 2011?  Use the new LinkedIn Groups marketing sites plan  Call Will Corry, the UK Content Curator 01784 434 412 for more information will@themarketingblog.co.uk