How Google Search Engine Works: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking

Search engine optimization is all about impacting how visible your website is in a search engine’s organic results. You’ll be making changes to your site’s technical setup as well as the content on the page in an effort to improve rank.

You’ll also explore off-site factors, such as sites that link to yours and how they’ve chosen to structure those links, plus you’ll also want to measure your performance and review your competition.

Now, if you’re just getting your feet wet with SEO, it’s important that you know how Google Search Engine Works: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking.

Now, at a high level, companies like Google will have a bot, basically a software program that crawls the web, and it does this by following links, links from your site to other pages on your site, and links from one site to another.

The crawler arrives at a page, reads the code, and then stores that information. That stored information is called the index and your initial goal is to be, well, indexed by Google.

If you’re indexed, you’ll rank, and you might not rank well but you have the potential for ranking. And when I talk about rank, I’m referring to which position you appear in for a particular search query.

Now, when you enter a search term, Google will do its best to provide the most important and relevant answers and then rank those from say best to worst.

The better Google is at their job, the more likely you are to use them and the more money they make, so it’s in their best interests to deliver the best content, and because Google drives a mind-boggling amount of traffic each day, it’s in your best interest to rank well for relevant terms.

Now, rank is roughly determined by importance, quality, and relevance.

There’s actually a very complex algorithm that’s going to churn through hundreds of variables to decide where your page lands, and many of these variables are what you’re going to be trying to optimize.

And there are areas that you can control that might be articles that you publish, backlinks that you acquire, how your website is programmed, and whether your experience is mobile friendly.

Google’s even going to evaluate the quality of the pages that you are linking to. If they’re on brand, relevant, and popular, well, it’s going to assume that you’re more credible than if off-topic, unpopular pages are linking to your content.

Now, there are variables that you can’t control, which could be users searching from a specific location, topics that are trending, current events that are happening, and even your competition could be skewing your results.

All this to say that SEO done well can provide an impressive ROI. Done poorly, it’ll negatively impact your organic search efforts.