If you have a business, it is not enough to create a website. You want to let people know that your business exists and that your website is live. This is made possible by letting search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo find your site. But how do these search engines do that?
Website Bots, Crawlers, or Spiders
These search engines use crawlers more known as bots or spiders to crawl into any website. They are used to get information and understand information about a particular website.
Bots scans the newly created web pages. ‘Discovery’ is the term used when bots are searching for new web pages to crawl. The web pages are discovered and scanned by these bots. After which, they are added to the database's search engine’s index. This makes it possible for the search engine to show your page in the page result. The search engine shows the webpage that is most relevant to the user's query.
For the search engine to show results about a certain query, it would need the following data:
- Page Title
- Meta Description
- Main Heading
- Related Domain Name
- User-Readable Content
- Proper Design and Layout of the Webpage
- No Duplicate and Plagiarized Content
- Sitemap
- Robots.txt file
The crawlers will analyze the content from this information to determine its relevance to what is being searched. Complex algorithms are used for analyzation of data to display a webpage on the search result.
These bots are important to let search engines know that your website does exist. These bots make it possible for your website to be searched but you need to work on search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of improving your website’s ranking and visibility. Remember, there is at least one website being created every three seconds according to some research. You are competing with a huge number of other websites within your industry.
There are several types of web crawler bots which include the following:
- Googlebot
- DuckDuckBot
- BingBot
- Baiduspider and Yandex Bot
- Slurp Bot
Sitemaps
Crawling your website could take days, weeks, or even months before it shows up on search engines. Another way of making sure that your website is crawled is through sitemaps. When you want Google to search your website faster, create a sitemap.
A sitemap serves as a blueprint for your website. It contains information such as images, videos, and other information related to your website. This is in XML format which allows for efficient and faster crawling and indexing of pages.
The Way Search Engine Works
There are several techniques wherein these bots crawl and index these websites. It involves the following:
HTML Parsing
Parsing means that HTML code is extracted to get important information such as the title page, paragraph page, and headers. The Google Bots will read and analyze the programming language on which the website was created.
Crawling and Indexing on JavaScript
Websites in HTML are not the only ones being crawled by search engines. According to recent postings in SEO communities, websites in JavaScript are easier to crawl and index compared to how it has been in the past. Google’s algorithms have also improved in understanding and rendering websites in JavaScript. Although, it is still possible that there could be instances that technical hiccups may occur when a website is running fully on JavaScript codes.
Linking
Two kinds of links can be done with the website: interlinking or backlinking. Interlinking is the method wherein you are linking a certain webpage from your website and connecting it with a page that’s already ranking. Backlinking is the other method where another website links back to your site. This helps in crawling and indexing your page.
Typing a query on a search engine is simple. But unknown to many, there are complex mechanisms involved at the backend. This mechanism allows the search engine to provide relevant and satisfactory answers to their query. Numerous algorithms come into play before you get an answer to your query. But this is hardly recognized since most search engines can display search results in just seconds.
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