How search engines find your content

A search engine is a tool that provides answers (search results) to questions (search queries). For example, when you type “chocolate chip cookie recipe” into Google, it shows you a page of possible answers.

Before a search engine can show results, it needs to create a master list of possible answers. This process is called “crawling”.

A crawler (also called a spider or bot) is an automated program that visits your website pages and:

• Scans all your content, images, and other media.
• Creates a stored copy (cache) of your site.
• Views your site similar to how a visitor would see it.
• Follows links to visit other pages on your site and even other websites you’ve linked to.

Note: Search engines often discover your website through links from other sites.

After crawling your site, search engines store your site’s information in a specialized database called an index. This is like a massive digital library containing data from billions of websites.

According to recent claims, Google indexes:

• Hundreds of billions of webpages.
• Over 100 billion gigabytes of data.
• Information from approximately 130 trillion known websites.

When someone searches, several things happen in just seconds:

1. The search engine analyzes the search query (like “best vegan tacos”).
2. It determines the likely intent behind the search.
3. It ranks relevant pages from its index based on over 200 factors.
4. It delivers a search engine results page (SERP) with the best matches.

The search engine considers many factors when deciding which pages to show, including:

• The searcher’s location.
• The device they’re using.
• The quality and relevance of website content.
• How other websites reference that content.

Consider the topic of the page or post you selected in the previous lesson. Follow these steps:

1. Perform a search using terms you think people would use to find information about your topic.
2. Look at the search results – are they similar to your content?
3. If necessary, try different search terms until you find results that better match your content.

Goal: Find the search terms that display results similar to your content. This helps you understand what words to use in your own content to appear in similar searches.