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How Search Engine Optimization Works?

There are three basic stages for a search engine: crawling – where content is discovered; indexing, where it is analysed and stored in huge databases; and retrieval, where a user query fetches a list of relevant pages.

Search engines have two major functions: crawling and building an index, and providing search users with a ranked list of the websites they've determined are the most relevant.

crawling:  Crawling is where it all begins – the acquisition of data about a website. This involves scanning the site and getting a complete list of everything on there – the page title, images, keywords it contains, and any other pages it links to – at a bare minimum. An automated bot – a spider – visits each page, just like you or I would, only very quickly. Even in the earliest days, Google reported that they were reading a few hundred pages a second.

Indexing:  indexing is the process of taking all of that data you have from a crawl, and placing it in a big database. Imagine trying to a make a list of all the books you own, their author and the number of pages. Going through each book is the crawl and writing the list is the index.

The world of SEO is full of so many different search engines, firms, opinions, and more. Google recommends one thing, Bing another, and then companies and message boards tell you not to believe it, and really the only way to rank is by doing this or that. SERPS, organic ranks, search marketing, algorithm updates, penalties, backlinks, colored hats and more... it can get overwhelming to try to figure out how search engine optimization works, and where to even begin. Here at Creative California, we work hard to make what we do clear and easy to understand, so here's our quick breakdown of how it all works.