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In recent years, I’ve avoided classifying myself as an SEO consultant, though, because it has some negative connotations with it that I would like to avoid. I often conflict with other SEO professionals because they focus on algorithms over search engine users. I’ll touch base on that later in the article. What Is A Search Engine? Simply put, a search engine is a tool to find a relevant resource on the Internet. Search engines index and store your site’s public information and use complex algorithms to rank and reveal what they believe is the appropriate result back to the search engine user. What Are The Most Popular Search Engines? In the United States, the most popular search engines are: 88.1% Bing 6.89% Yahoo! 2.65% DuckDuckGo 1.91% YANDEX 0.18% AOL 0.08% Source: Statcounter One search engine that’s missing here is YouTube.
By volume, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, although all it is indexing is video content on its own platform. However, it’s a property that should not be overlooked since so many users use it to search for products, services, how-tos, and other information. TIP: Many SEO practitioners are always looking at Google since they dominate the market. That doesn’t mean that an audience you wish to reach isn’t on another search engine that you could easily focus on and rank for though. Don’t be dismissive of these other search engines… who still get tens of millions of queries a day on them. How Do Search Engines Find and Index Your Pages? Content Management Systems (CMS) that are optimized for search engines will alert the search engine of its content being updated, and then provide the necessary information for the search engine crawler to crawl the content.
Here’s how: The search engine has to know that you exist. They can discover your site through a link on another website, you can register your site via their search console, or you can do what’s known as a ping where you notify the search engine of your site. The search engine must be notified that your content has changed or been updated. Search engines have some standards that they deploy for this. Robots.txt – a root text file in your hosting environment will tell the search engines what they should and should not crawl on your site. XML Sitemaps – one or often a series of connected XML files are automatically published by your content management system that shows the search engines every page available and the last time it was updated. Index or Noindex – your pages can individually have header status codes that notify the search engine of whether they should or should not index the page. The process for a search engine to crawl and index your site is to read your robots.txt file, follow your XML sitemap, read the page status information, and then index the page content.
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