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How search engines understand your content

Search engines can be quite overwhelming when it comes to ensuring your website has a great page ranking across a variety of search engines such as Google and Bing. 

Search Engines essentially work by ‘crawling’ billions of pages with their web crawlers. A search engine navigates the web by downloading each web page and its links to crawl new web pages that have become available. 

Once a web page has been ‘crawled’ by the search engine, the web page is added to that search engine’s index’. This index includes all URLs that have been crawled as well as key information about each web page such as:

  • Keywords – The web crawlers will collect the main keywords of each web page
  • Content – For a search engine to understand what is on your page, it has to look at the type of content you’re talking about
  • Freshness – The search engine will look at how fresh the content of the web page is and when it was last updated, so it’s important to ensure you update your web pages regularly.
  • User Engagement – The search engine will look at how people interact with each web page and domain. 

Search engines work to present the user with web pages that are relevant to their search and are of high quality, this is called ‘ranking’. Web pages that are most relevant to the user will be ‘ranked’ from most useful to least and this all depends on your page content as well as other factors such as:

  • The location of the user depends on their country, or if they are looking for something local to them
  • Language 
  • Previous search history 
  • Device 

It’s important to ensure that when working on each web page, you make it easy for not only your target audience to read but also for search engines to crawl. Search Engines are always updating and changing their SEO best practices, so you need to make sure you’re following what is new and changing, as well as making sure each web page has the best SEO practices it can have to be ranked higher.

For any questions on search engine optimisation or how you can improve your ranking on search engines, use the contact form to get in touch. 

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  • Written by Jess Cory, June 20 2022