Taking time to understand how google search works is pretty important when you’re trying to grow your site’s organic traffic and expanding your community. In fact, Google uses automated program called “Google bot” which uses various methods no regular basis to find new or updated sites to add it to its sites list. It’s important to realize that sites aren’t manually submitted to appear in Google search results, but are found automatically.
Google search works in 3 stages to find, explore, and add sites to its index.
Crawling.
This is what I call the discovery stage. Google uses automated crawler program (Google bot) to constantly look for new pages then add its list of known pages. Now you may be asking yourself, but how does Google know about these pages? Well, I’ve got you.
Google knows about pages through one of the following ways:
a. Google already visited this page.
b. Google follows a link from an existing known page to a new unknown page.
c. Website owner submits a sitemap, list of site’s pages, for Google to crawl.
So generally speaking, crawling is all about discovering the new pages that Google doesn’t know about. Given these points, let’s dive in more to find out how we can improve your site’s crawling.
- Submit your sitemap to Google to make it crawl your pages and index it. (many URLs at once)
- Submit crawl requests for your individual pages (single URL at a time)
- Add internal links in your pages. (i.e. Internal links are links from a page of your site to another page in your site)
Indexing.
Basically, indexing is considered an analysis stage. After Google bot finds about new pages, it renders these pages to find what they’re about. Google bot looks at the page’s content including texture context as well as graphical content. Consequently, Google bot stores the information about the page in Google index. Google index is a huge database where information about sites pages are stored.
With that being said, several strategies can be applied to enhance Google indexing:
- Use short and meaningful page titles.
- Make sure that page headings convey the subject of the page
- Google understands text more than graphical content therefore ensure having more texture content in your pages. In addition, don’t forget to add alt text for the images and videos in your pages.
Serving Search Results.
Google displays search results based on the highest quality. Determining the quality of your site depends on several factors such as user’s location, language, and device. One thing to realize is that Google ranking is done programmatically based on each website performance and content. The best way to improve your ranking is by applying the following strategies.
- Make sure your pages are fast to load
- Keep your content useful and up to date
- Ensure that your site is mobile friendly. You can test your site’s mobile friendliness here.
- SEO tools are pretty useful so make sure to learn how to use them.
Now that you’ve read this post, you know how Google search works and you can start applying the strategies I mentioned to enhance your site’s ranking.
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