Google SEO: How GoogleBot discovers and indexes your web page
SEO, or "Search Engine Optimisation," plays an important role in the running of any successful online business. Search engine optimisation determines how highly a website will rank when a specific term is searched using a search engine, and since customers typically only examine the first few search results of the first page, it is a good idea for a company to strive for a high ranking on as many relevant searches as possible. Of the number of search engines available, the most popular by far is Google, which accounts for around 90% of all searches. So how do you get your website to rise to the top of Google's search results? By employing Google SEO techniques, a good place to start would be to first understand how Google goes about finding web pages and how it then determines that page's ranking within its search results. The three key stages it uses to do this are called crawling, indexing, and serving. Crawling is the process by which Google discovers new and updated web pages to be indexed. The programme used to carry out this process is known as Googlebot. Crawling: Googlebot's crawling process first starts with a list of URLs generated from its previous crawl; it then visits each of these websites in turn, detecting all links on the page and adding them to its list of pages to crawl. Any new websites, changed pages, broken, or dead links are updated to the Google index. Indexing: The Googlebot processes all pages it crawls through, compiling an index of all the words it finds on the page. It also takes into account information found in key content tags and attributes. Note: Google is not able to process information in all formats, such as parts of the content found in rich media files, flash, and dynamic web pages. Results: The order of results in a Google search is determined by a complicated algorithm that takes a large number of factors into account to calculate the most relevant page. One such significant example of this is a web page's "PageRank." A website's page rank is a measure of its importance and is calculated by the number and quality of incoming links from other websites. Google does its best to identify spam, so when attempting to apply Google SEO techniques, consider that links from other webpages that contain substantial content and a higher PageRank value are a better option than a larger number of links to bare or blank websites.