Search Engines

What are search engines?

An obvious example of a search engine is Google, they give access to users to search the internet for content using search terms or keywords. There are many search engines like Bing, Ask, and DuckDuckGo to name just a few. When a surfer types a query into a search engine, the search engine returns a results page or SERP (search engine results page),  ranking the found webpages in order of their relevance. How this ranking is done differs across search engines as they all use different algorithms.
These constantly changing or evolving algorithms, The search engines say they constantly change algorithms to improve the user experience, but they also change algorithms so Google ads become the only constant way to stay at the top of the search engine results pages. They claim to understand how users search and give them the best answer to their query, this means giving priority to the highest quality and most relevant pages.

You will also come across terms such as crawl, spiders, bots.
But the main purpose of a search engine is to Crawl, Index and Rank all the keyword phrases, these are the three key methods how search engines work.

Crawling refers to a search engines use of programs, called spiders, bots or crawlers. They normally use the above mentioned every couple of days, so from time to time content may be out-of-date as a crawl hasn’t taken place for a few days.
Indexing refers to the search engines understanding and categorisation of the content on a website or web page, through the keyword query.
Ranking refers to the search results being ranked based on a undisclosed factors, these may include keyword density, speed of the page loading and incoming links. The search engine will aim is to provide the user with the most relevant results.
Although most search engines will provide tips on how to improve your page ranking, the exact algorithms used are well guarded and change frequently to avoid misuse. But by following search engine optimisation (SEO) best practice you can ensure that:

If you follow white hat methods of optimising your website you are less likely to run into problems with . Following SEO best practice will help the search engine understand your content so you can rank for the right search queries.

Search engines can easily crawl your website. You can also prompt them to crawl new content.
Your content is indexed for the right keywords so it can appear for relevant searches.
Your content can rank highly on the SERP.