Quick Guide On SEO | Crawling | Indexing | Ranking

The Internet is a pool of data. Thousands of article on a variety of topics are being uploaded on it every minute. No one can acquire the whole knowledge available on the internet.

Have you ever gone to the next page of a search engine? Next to next page? The after that? If you have, you probably know that the trail is endless. Now the point to think is what makes these articles or sites pop on the top of the first page of a search engine? The answer is SEO.

SEO: The breakdown

Search engines search anything by using three functions: Crawl, Index, and Rank

•    Crawl: Finding the related code/content regarding each URL, all over the internet

•    Index: Indexing means saving/storing and organizing the content found on the internet and make it ready to display whenever a query is generated.

•    Rank: The site/article is ranked according to relevance if the query. The most relevant shows up on the top.

Search Engine Crawling

Search engine basically has its own team of robots which are called spiders or crawlers. These robots are sent in the crawling process to discover any new update in the content. First, these robots fetch some web pages and then hop on to the web-links related to that webpage to find new URLs. These are then added to the Index (a database or collection of the URLs). When someone searches for content, the most relevant URLs are retrieved from the Index.

Search Engine Index

An Index is a database where all the URLs, links, contents, etc. are stored and organized.

Search Engine Ranking

Whenever a search is performed, the search engine retrieves the data from the Index and then show up the result in the following order. The contents are ranked according to the relevance of the reach query. The most relevant content or the URL is given the first rank and it is shown on the top of the first page of the search engine.

But to that, crawlers must first find the content. So one should make sure that your URL is not blocking the search engine crawlers.

There are a variety of search engines available such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. But the most important is given to Google. Why? Because 99% of people use google to search for anything.

Google is dominant in the search engine world.