11 Nov How Google Search Works: The Ultimate Beginners Guide
Google search is getting advanced each day with new updates and information. As a beginner, understanding the core mechanism of Google is vital for us to improve your exposure. Without holding a rank, the efforts are nearly useless.
So, to free you from this burnout — we’re gonna be getting into the mechanics of SEO. Before we answer how Google works for beginners, let’s understand the four major sources of information for Google:
- Web Pages: Google collects information about you through the existing web pages.
- Your submitted information: Google has several platforms where they ask for your submissions like Google My Business account or Google Maps.
- Information on the Internet: The internet has a huge collection of public databases and Google collects information through them.
- Book Scanning: Google scams tons of books and extracts information.
Google also uses some other sources like registered email addresses, the app where you sign in with your Google account, etc.
How Google Search Works For Beginners
A major point that people skate across is they often focus only on ranking a website. But to rank a website, you firstly need to be able to crawl the website, and then index a website for ranking. The Google search works on these three major steps:
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Ranking (Serving)
#1 Crawling in Google
So what usually happens in this process is, Google has bots known as crawlers. Their purpose is to visit any new websites to confirm it’s existence and build a database.
Initially, crawlers will only crawl a few pages of your website, but afterwards, they will follow the links on your previously crawled pages to discover new pages.
Make sure to add a robot.txt file and sitemap in the root directory of your site. This informs Google about the pages that you want them to crawl.
You can use the Google search console page 2 to navigate crawlers activity on your website for the last 90 days.
Here are some tips that you should follow for better crawling:
Mobile-Friendly version is more preferable
Google has different types of bots for different purposes, but two of them play a vital role — Google bot desktop, and Google bot smartphones.
Google was originally crawling your site using their desktop Google bot, but then it moved to using Google bot smartphone.
This is quite important because many businesses have a different site for their mobile version compared to the desktop version of this site.
Just imagine you know, you’re building a site and then you have a mobile version of your site and it’s pretty much just like a cut-down version of your site where you may have only a quarter of your content on there.
It makes sense to do that, but the problem is, Google bot is now using their smartphone crawler.
You’ll get judged based on the mobile version of the site.
So it’s important to make sure that you’re building your site based upon the mobile version because people are accessing the site more on their smartphone than their desktop.
Even with Page Speed, you get judged based upon your mobile site version, not your desktop version.
Importance of Robot.txt
Then there’s a file on your website that allows you to permit the crawlers to crawl your site and it’s called the Robots.txt file.
This is the file that the crawler will see and be able to determine what it’s allowed to do.
You can be specific on which kind of crawler you want to access, or the type of directories as well.
The homepage should contain all the links
If you run a small site with nearly a thousand pages, and you want Google to crawl just one page from there they can crawl by themselves — then make it your homepage.
Your home page should contain all the necessary lengths of the pages that you want Google to crawl.
Also, make sure to keep your home base updated with new page addition.
Backlinks are vital
Tried to get Edu backlinks from repudiated websites at a better position in Google search. This will help the Google crawlers to understand your website more efficiently and easily.
Google suggests you get backlinks from similar niches. These backlinks should follow Google guidelines and shouldn’t be spammy. Batman bag links can cause your site to be blacklisted forever
#2 Indexing in Google
Once Google crawls your website it tries to understand it well. Google will read and understand images, text, graphics, and other elements to know more about your site. This whole process is known as indexing.
How will you know if your site has been indexed?
There’s, there are two main ways through which you can quickly check whether your site is indexed or not.
First Method: Using the Commands
One is by using a command. Here you type in site, colon, and then you type in the URL of the page.
See the example:
site: https://anyxyzsite.com/
And then, you see something like Google has an index on 282 pages, from anyxyzsite.com.
Second Method: Using the URL
So just imagine you were building a power page five years ago and you’ve updated the page. Now when you use these commands, you can see that the page was indexed.
Also, you can see the date when it was indexed, but maybe you want it to be indexed a little bit quicker. What will you do?
One of the things you can do is that you can go to your Google Search Console, and then you can paste your page into the URL section.
From there you can be able to determine its index and when it was last crawled.
Say a certain page was crawled on August 6th 2021 at 1:39 am, but you may want it to be crawled today because you know that you’ve made edits to it recently.
How would you do that? Just click on the ‘Request indexing’ button to be able to crawl the site.
Here are some tips that you should follow for better indexing:
- Use precise and defining headings.
- Use proper heading tags to define your content.
- Try to use text more than other elements but keep it meaningful.
- Use alter the text to define images, videos, and other elements.
Ranking
Google cares about their readers and wants to present the best piece in front of them. Whenever someone searches for a specific topic, Google goes through their indexing database to find the best possible answer to the readers.
If your content meets all the requirements of the Readers following Google’s Webmaster guidelines, then your ranking will automatically increase in the search result.
The search results are also based on the location of searches, the language of searches, and other factors.
For example:
If a person living in Singapore is searching, ‘The best restaurants near me. Now, Google will show the results based on Singapore instead of any random results.
These search results are based on Google my business. This is the reason why website owners are suggested to register on Google My Business.
This helps Google to understand your business location and suggest it to the readers.
Here are the things you can do to improve your ranking:
- Keep your website up to date.
- Follow Google Webmaster guidelines.
- Avoid spammy content and provide high-quality information.
- Make your website mobile-friendly.
- Increase the loading page of your website.
- Increase reader engagement on your website.
- Try to get Links from the high authorities website.
How Ranking, Indexing and Crawling are Interrelated?
Google wants to be as efficient as possible so it only crawls your site how often it needs to crawl and this will eventually result in better indexing and ranking.
Just imagine you have a local cafe that updates its website once a year. Another hand, you have a news site that updates its site three times a day.
Google will most likely crawl on that new site constantly every single day compared to crawling on that local cafe.
It crawls the site to see what differences have happened since the last crawl. If there have been many differences that happened since that last crawl, it will increase your crawl rate higher.
If Google crawled your site last week and nothing has changed, it will slowly reduce your crawl rate because there’s no need to crawl your site.
But if you’re constantly building content, and you’re constantly updating your site there’s a constant need for Google to crawl your site.
By doing so, you’re increasing the scope of your keywords because you have more content.
Also, you’re able to move faster than all your other competitors because Google is constantly crawling your website which is why people often say content is king.
Content not only enables you to have a bigger scope of keywords, but it also allows you to enter the search results more aggressively, and faster as well.
Final credits
Each topic that we have covered in this post can have a separate tutorial, but for beginners, we have delivered enough information. So what are you waiting for? Start with your first website and follow the tips for better results.
