Spiders, crawling, search strings, oh my!
If you’re currently developing a marketing strategy for your firm, it’s important to recognize the key role online marketing plays in your plan.
A significant part of online marketing is – obviously – the use of the web. People use search engines every day, but majority of people don’t fully understand exactly how search engines work. In order to produce successful search results, search engines perform a few specific activities. If you’re interested in performing SEO on your firm’s web page, it’s crucial that you understand what effect it will have on search engines’ results.
Crawling: Search engines crawl the internet to see what’s out there using a piece of software usually called a spider. Spiders follow links from one web page to the next and indicate everything they find out on their way.
Indexing: Once a page is crawled, the page’s content is indexed and the indexed page is stored in a database. This means that the particular terminology best describing that page are recognized and specific keywords are assigned to that page.
Processing: When a search request appears, the search engine then compares the search string in the request with the indexed pages existing in the database.
Calculating: Since generally more than one single page contains the search string, the search engine calculates the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to the search string.
Retrieving: The final step in a search engine’s process is actually retrieving the results, which simply means displaying them in the browser.
About Leigh Mazzagetti
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This article is a great overview of the search engine process. Using loaded key words in key places, strategic back links for spiders to follow, and competing for spots on the most competitive strings will earn your firm’s site a lofty place in the listings. As a legal domain reseller, I have a lot of experience instructing clients (lawyers) on how to use their domain as a tool by keeping abreast of search engine processes and capitalizing on opportunities for increased exposure. In the future I’ll send clients in need of education straight here for a crash course! Thanks for the wise words!