Dallas Internet Marketing

How Do Search Engines Work?

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This is part six of the Business Owner’s Guide to Internet Marketing. The other posts in the series are:

• Introduction
• Is Internet Marketing Right for My Business?
• What’s In a Website?
• Internet Marketing Opportunities
• Why Search is Powerful.
• How do Search Engines Work?
• What is SEO and What are Opportunities for Your Business?
• Pay Per Click Marketing and Opportunities for Your Business
• Relationship Driven Internet Marketing

Have you ever wondered how Google, Yahoo or Bing orders their results? Or why do they order it in the way that they do? Like when I type in “Best hotel in Dallas”

How did Google decide “HotelRooms.com” was the best fit for this search? Or why did Yahoo choose BestValueHotelDallas.com? Why did Bing’s results only returned one actual hotel, the rest are websites listing hotels.

When you realize that studies show that the top result gets 42% of the traffic for that particular query, from a business perspective it becomes even more important to understand how search engines work.

How does a search engine gather information? Watch Out for Spiders!

The idea behind most search engines is this: A company like Google creates a computer program called a crawler or spider. This program “crawls” or “spiders” through the internet from website to website gathering information about the content of the website. The means through which it crawls are links from one website to another. It records this information in a database and a “search engine” then analyzes the information as needed when a user (you) asks for it.

You type in “Best Hotels in Dallas” and Google sends a query through their database of all the information their crawler has collected,  saying “Give me the best results for “10 Best Hotels in Dallas” and make it snappy!”

How does the search engine analyze and return information for searchers?

Each search engine has created their own formula, or algorithm, by which they have decided the most important factors for returning the most relevant website for the search query. Google has over 200 data points they analyze in returning search results. Some examples of things they look at include website address (URL), page titles, text on the page, how old is the website, and how many other websites link to this information.

Hold On, What’s A Link?

A link is a spot on a web page that references another spot on either the current web page or another web page. Here’s an example:

On the Wikipedia page about the Dallas Cowboys they reference a series of other websites (the official Cowboys website, ESPN website, Sports Illustrated etc.) and link to those pages, meaning, I can click on the words “Official website” and it will take me to the Cowboys official website.

Search engines use links as a reference point in evaluating the quality and relevance of websites/pages.  Search engines look at links like votes. Here, in the Search Engine’s eyes, Wikipedia has cast a vote for “DallasCowboys.com” by linking to it, as if Wikipedia is saying “Hey, this is a quality site about the Dallas Cowboys!”

Search Engines use the number of votes (links) a website has received from other sites as a measure of relevance. A website with 1000 other websites linking to it saying this website is about the Dallas Cowboys, makes a search engine feel like the site in question is not only about the Dallas Cowboys, but is a high quality website about the Dallas Cowboys, simply because so many other websites have referenced it, and thus is a good candidate to show in search resuls about Dallas Cowboys.

Now, for you sticklers, it is important to point out that search engines don’t actually count votes (links) from websites like Wikipedia, but that is for another topic.

The search engine’s goal is to return the most relevant, best results for any search query performed worldwide. If you search “10 best hotels in Dallas” they want to return to you the best websites that exist on the internet to answer that question ordered from most relevant to least relevant.

So, to take the example from above, Google would say that the HotelRooms.com page about Dallas hotels is the best answer for the search we performed.

That’s Nice, But Again, Why Does This Matter?

Good point. Just a reminder from our post about Is Internet Marketing Right for My Business? -

• 60% of local business searches now happen online
• 87% of consumers questioned in one survey had used the internet to research a product or a service before purchasing
• In 2007, over 600 billion dollars of commerce was influenced by the internet.

And a few more statistics to help prove the point:

• Searchers visit the first website listed in the search results 42% of the time
• The second result gets almost 12% of the visits.
• The third results about 8% of the time.

Simply put, it matters how search engines work because it is lucrative for your company. If your company can show up in the top of the results for searches related to the products and services you offer, then you will get more visitors to your website, and all things being equal, turn more of those visitors into customers.

Ok, Makes Sense. But What Can I Do About It?

We will cover that answer in the next post.

Photo Attribution: Jasmic