The Secret to Search Engine Optimization - Part 2

Part 2 of 2

Yesterday we unveiled the secret behind search engine optimization. And just in case you missed it… ‘Here’s the truth: there really is no secret or easy street to SEO’. There’s no doubt that any increase in ranking on a Google search results page will increase your traffic. And to get from page 12 to page 1 on Google will be that much easier if you have a better understanding of what makes up a search engine.

What goes on behind the scenes of a search engine –
Essentially search engines are made up of three pieces of software. Together, spider software, the index software and query software make up a search engine. We spoke about spider software in yesterday’s blog so today we’ll make sense of index and query software.

Index software – If spiders (or robots) are roaming the net recording data and links, the index software catches everything that the spider throws at it. Index software sorts through the mass of content, links and URL’s using a complex math formula that indexes the keywords and phrases etc. Index software helps figure out what each web page is all about and eventually ranks each page as to the relevance those web pages might mean to the person who is searching.

Your takeaway – Don’t waste your photographs, videos and Flash intros. Make sure that spiders see them by identifying each by a text ‘alt tag’. Indexed pages are refreshed at different intervals, some every day or two, and others only doing a periodic refresh every week or month.

Query software – As the spider goes through each web page it records everything about that page where it’s analyzed and stored by the index software. It’s at this point that a query is made. When someone types the search words Inbound marketing in the query box of Google, then it’s time for the query software to go to work. Query software is the frontline of what we see when we go to a search engine while spider and indexing is transparent to us yet they do most of the work.

Your takeaway – When you make a search, query software checks all the records that have been created by its own index software. It sorts the massive collection of URL’s, text and links that the spider has collected. In actual fact, the query software doesn’t search the entire web but it searches what they have collected and indexed.
Search engines do all the work. They’ve collected, analyzed and indexed web pages for you – now it’s your turn.

Don’t forget to download a copy of our: ‘A super easy way to optimize your web page’. I know you’ll find it helpful and it’s FREE.