How search engines work?

Search Engine or Information Retrieval (IR) System is an automated program responsible for searching the user's query through web. IR system holds a broader view for a developer than that for a consumer.


Here I aim to discuss the search engine optimization techniques but with a simple understanding of the working of a search engine.This seems to be a techy task.Isn't it? But the good news is that it is not!!
Working of search engine takes few simple steps which we are going to discuss in this article.See, here I want to make it clear that this piece of information is certainly going to help you rank up your site but only when you implement it properly.So, read it and don't be afraid of the competition.


A Search Engine is an Automated software which is popularly known as 'spider' or 'bot'. These spiders crawl the web and search for the documents according to your query. They match queries against indexes they create. IR system comprise of 4 essential modules :
                 
                               
                                    1. Document processor.
                                    2. Query processor.
                                    3. Search and matching function.
                                    4. Ranking capability.


Step 1 : DOCUMENT PROCESSOR


             The search engine prepares , processes and inputs the documents ,pages or sites that users search against.
This means that when you submit your site to google or any other search engine , the software is going to read your pages , select keywords for your site fro your pages and creates an index.
                 index = words in a document + pointers to their location within the document.
This index is also called as inverted file.
Every search engine has an algorithm of its own to generate keywords.But the factors that help in deciding of keywords will be discussed in fourth step , i.e. ranking capability.


Step 2 : QUERY PROCESSING


             The search engine reads the query of consumer and maps it against the inverted files that have the query terms as keywords.


Step 3 : SEARCH & MATCHING FUNCTION

            This is the most important part to be read carefully because it deals with the attributes of your site that decide its rank.
Matching - Searching the inverted file for documents which meet query requirements is called matching.


Tip 1 - your document must score well in matching with users query.


Now , the question arises that what document features make a good match to query ? 
So here are some features that are certainly going to help.
1. Term frequency -  The term occurring frequently in your document is going to grab the search engine's  attraction towards picking up keywords from your document.
2. Location of terms - Many search engines give preference to words found in the title or lead paragraph or in metadata of a document.
3. Link analysis - It is based on how well connected each page is.
4. Popularity - Google and several other search engines add popularity to link analysis to help determine the relevance or value of pages.
5. Length -  In a choice between two documents containing the same query terms , the document that contains a proportionally higher occurrence of the term relative to length of document is assumed more likely to be relevant.
6.Date of Publication - some search engines assume that the more recent the information , more likely that it will be useful or relevant to the user.Therefore , they present results beginning with the most recent to the less current.
7. Proximity of query terms -  When terms in a query occur near each other within a document , it is more likely that the document is relevant to the query than if the terms occur at greater distance.
8. Proper nouns - Famous proper nouns tend to get more priority in indexing.


Tip 2 - Implement the above 8 points in your document.


Step 4 : RANKING CAPABILITY


Here comes the best part of learning the search engine's working.How does search engines rank your pages? Well! as said earlier, all search engines have their own algorithms to rank websites but something is common to all which can help in tactfully designing your website and rank it well(no doubt, by all fair means!).Take care of few things that are following - 


1. The title of page should give useful information about the subject of page.
2. Words that are mentioned towards beginning of a document are given more weight.
3. Words that are repeated frequently also gain weight.
4. Description and title tags are important.
5. Documents linked to other documents on web gain attraction of search engine.
6. Take care of frequency as well as positioning of keywords.More the frequency, better is the weight.Occurrence of keywords in headers, title, metadata are helpful.
7. Use keywords that are appropriate to your subject.
8. Make sure that your keywords appear in the top paragraphs of actual text on your webpage.
9. words that appear in <h1> , <h2> , <h3> etc. are given more weight by some search engines.


Tip 3 - "description" meta tag is considered to be the most important and most likely to be indexed. So use it wisely.


Tip 4 - In "keyword" meta tag , list a few synonyms for keywords or foreign transitions of keywords.


I sincerely hope that this information must have helped you out in learning the process of ranking of sites by search engine.Just follow the tips and the points that I have provided here. It will help.
Do not worry about other sites on the same topic because it has to be someone on the top and 99% chances that it can be you.

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