By Local Loyal Clients LLC.
Written by: Zethra
– What are web search engines?
A search engine works by crawling web pages using interlinking hyperlinks as a bridge for discovery. Once a web-page has been crawled it is indexed by the search engine so that certain search phrases, generally known as “keywords”, will result in a link to the page from the search engine results pages (SERPs) produced by a search for those keywords.
What Are Search Engines and How Do You Get Web Traffic From Them?
If you have a newly created website then you may be at a loss as to how to get people to visit it. There’s nothing sadder or more disheartening than a site that you have put a large amount of work into that gets no web traffic from search engines.
Fortunately, there are ways to improve your chances of getting web search engines to send organic traffic to your site. Before you work on getting that traffic though it’s important to have a good idea of what search engines are and how they work. Here are some useful things to know.
In the early internet, the main way to find websites with useful information for the searcher was to use web directories. As the internet grew the capacity of any web directory to index it was dwarfed by the sheer amount of information on the web. As a result, discoverability for information on the internet moved from directories to search-based engines that crawl your website and index the pages they find.
Some search engines do their own web-crawling and indexing of searchable web-pages and others are meta-search engines. Meta-search engines basically use the results from the engines that do their own crawling and compile them into search results shown by the meta-search engine.
– Do search engines index the entire internet?
The internet is huge and it’s debatable how much of it that web search engines actually end up indexing. There are also situations where search engines may choose not to index a website. For example, some of the more spammy websites end up being de-indexed by the search engines as their pages are mostly filled with duplicate and low-value content.
Other websites may contain content that is illegal, misleading, or problematic in other ways, and search engines may choose not to index that content. Content that is duplicated elsewhere is often also left out of search results, with the oldest and presumably original version of that content being favored and displayed.
Then there is the deep web. The deep web is basically the part of the internet that is deliberately hidden behind log-in pages and similar security blockades. The deep web often includes personal and private information for people using online services. This may include information such as credit card numbers, financial information, medical histories, and personal details such as residential addresses. So not having the deep web accessible to search engines is actually a desirable result.
– How many search engines are there?
There are dozens of search engines that may crawl your website and index it for showing in web search results. Most of these engines only have fractions of a percent of the market share for web search though and are not really worth discussing. Others have high volume in non-English speaking countries which are outside the scope of this article.
Here are the six main web search engines for the US by search market share.
— Google (92.96%)
Google Web Search has been around since 1997 and was developed by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Scott Hassan. Google handles more than 5.4 billion searches every day and has the highest search market share in most English speaking countries.
Google search mainly utilizes a system called PageRank that ranks a website or web-page in its search index according to how many high-quality inbound links it has. Over time the PageRank system has evolved to focus on more natural linking structures and is used in conjunction with many other quality and authority indicators.
— Bing (2.34%)
Bing is owned by Microsoft and was designed as a replacement for their earlier MSN Search engine which later became Live Search. Bing was unveiled and released in May-June of 2009.
— Yahoo! (1.64%)
Yahoo! was one of the first search engines and directories on the web. Originally it was mainly directory-based but over time it transitioned to a more modern search engine.
— Baidu (0.92%)
China-based Baidu is the prominent search engine for the Chinese market. Its parent company Baidu, Inc is heavily invested in web technologies and artificial intelligence.
— Yandex Search (0.47%)
Yandex Search is Russia-based and has around 50% of the Russian search market. In addition to its Russian language site, Yandex is also attempting to break into the English language market via its Yandex.com search site.
— DuckDuckGo (0.43%)
DuckDuckGo was started by Gabriel Weinberg in February of 2008. The DuckDuckGo search engine was created in an attempt to avoid the “filter bubble” problem that many other search engines have. This issue occurs when search results tailored to a searcher’s past search history show a bias that puts the searcher in a type of echo chamber. This basically means that they get results that support their biases rather than providing useful bias-free information.
These market share results are mainly for western countries, with the market share in European and Eastern countries being significantly different. In the past Yandex has had around 50% estimated search volume in Russia and Baidu has had about 75% estimated search volume in China, for example. If your website targets English speaking countries though then these six are the search engines you should be focussing on.
As you can see from those results, Google is by far the major player in web search for English speaking countries. Most of your site’s search traffic will be coming from Google, so Google is the engine that you mainly need to please if you want that search traffic.
– What are the benefits of having web search engines crawl your website and index it?
Web traffic falls into three main categories. These are paid traffic, direct traffic, and organic traffic.
— Paid Web Traffic
This traffic is usually the result of using paid advertising placed onto sites that have their own existing organic and direct traffic. This can be a great way to kickstart a new site or power a site which is highly profitable with the right traffic, but it requires a carefully moderated approach. Just throwing untargeted paid traffic at a site will generally not produce profitable benefits as most of the visitors will not be interested in the site’s content.
Another issue with paid web traffic is that many services that claim to deliver paid traffic actually deliver useless bot visitors. This is particularly the case where you are buying visitors outright rather than buying ads that potential visitors might see and click on.
— Direct Web Traffic
Direct traffic is made up of web visitors that visit a site via their browser bookmarks or type-in addresses. These visitors already know about the site they are visiting and probably visit it regularly. An example of this would be people who visit forums and social media sites where they have an account.
Direct traffic can be highly useful but it is made up of people who already use your site, so it doesn’t represent traffic growth.
— Organic Web Traffic
Organic traffic is mostly traffic that comes from internet search engines that crawl your website and index it, although a small amount may come from organic links on third party sites. The advantage of organic traffic is that it is usually new visitors visiting your site, which allows your site to grow over time. Organic traffic from search engines is particularly useful as it is highly targeted towards the content on your site due to the way search engine indexing works. Because the visitors are highly targeted and highly engaged when compared to visitors from other traffic sources they are more likely to buy whatever you are selling or promoting. The benefits are that they tend to be far more profitable and productive for you as a result.
– How do you get web search engines to crawl your website?
Here are some steps that you can take to ensure that search engines can find and crawl your website.
— Create some backlinks to your site.
Most search engines can find your site regardless of backlinks, possibly through the whois database system. To speed up the process of discovery you can add some links back to your site’s pages, but don’t overdo this or it might be regarded as spam.
One option to create backlinks to get the engines to crawl your website is to use social media sites that allow linked media to be posted. Sites such as Pinterest allow images to be posted along with a link to the page that the image came from, for example.
— Use search engine submission sites.
You can find many free and paid sites that will submit your website to the search engines via their submission forms and APIs. It’s generally not worth paying for this service though as search engines will find your site naturally without you having to do anything. The only benefits to using these services are to speed the process up slightly.
– How do you get web search engines to index your website correctly?
The process of ensuring that your site is effectively crawled and indexed by search engines is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO mostly consists of ensuring that search engines can work out what your web pages are about and that they are able to match those pages to search keywords that are relevant for your pages and which are getting good search volume.
Here are some measures you can take to ensure that your site has a good chance of being ranked fairly.
- Ensure that your web-pages include keywords that are relevant to the contents of the page. To match your web-page against a search query the web search engine first needs to know what your page is about. Make sure that the page includes a few terms that you think that people will type into a search engine when they are looking for the type of content that you have on your page. Ideally the terms you target should be ones that have a high number of searches and a low amount of sites competing for those searches.
- Make sure that your site’s pages load quickly. The load time of web pages has become a ranking factor over the last few years. A slow loading site provides a poor experience for your visitors so you should ensure your site has the benefits of a fast load time. Avoid adding too much unnecessary bulk to the site and make sure that your web host is up to the job of serving your site quickly. If you test the load time of your site then first make sure that you clear your browser cache. You want to experience it the same way that a new visitor will. You can also find testing tools that will check issues, such as your site’s load time.
- Make sure that your site has a good linking structure with no orphaned pages. Your site should have navigation that branches out from your home page and from every other page on your site. Your navigation links should all provide good context for the content to be found at the end of those links so that both search engines and human visitors can find the content on your site that they are looking for.
Orphaned pages are basically pages that do not have any links leading to them from your site. This can happen if you rearrange your site’s linking structure and forget to link some pages. Make sure that all your site’s pages have links leading to them from somewhere else on your site.
Sitemap.
You may also want to consider creating a sitemap for your site. This is basically a directory of all the pages on your site. A sitemap provides a great way for search engines to find all your site’s content.
It’s debatable how effective the modern internet would be if search engines didn’t exist. The size of the internet means that it is difficult to find most of what’s available even with the search engines, and it would be near impossible without them. Search engines play a huge role on the internet and they will also play a massive role in delivering traffic to your website. By learning a bit more about them you should be able to put them to use more effectively to get that organic traffic that your website needs to survive and grow.
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