Barbershopping: Online Marketing: How Search Engines Work

by Dave Baker

Go to "Online Marketing for Chapters and Quartets"

Aside from posting flames to the Harmonet, the number one activity on the web is searching for stuff. Search engines have become so ubiquitous, we've begun to almost take them for granted. But having a site on the web is no guarantee that it will come up in the search results when people search for it. To understand why, it helps to understand how engines come up with their results.

When you go to Google and do a search for "barbershop tee-shirts," for example, Google doesn't go out right then and hunt down all of the pages on the Internet that match your search phrase. That would be an impossible feat of wasted time and computing resources. Instead, Google goes to its own "index" of known web pages and generates its results from there.

So then you might ask, Where does the index come from? Good question.

The index is compiled by an army of "web crawlers" (also known as "spiders" or "bots"), computer programs that spend all day and night prowling the web. The process never ends, since new sites and pages are continually being added to the net. Many pages change frequently, so they have to be constantly re-indexed. Here's the basic process:

1. A bot follows a link from another page and arrives at a page to be indexed. This is an inportant point, since a search engine can't index a page it doesn't know about.
2. The program looks at the text content of the page. (Note: you can see any page as a web crawler would see it by pulling down the View menu in your web browser and choosing "Source" or "Page Source.")
3. Using special algorithms, the bot analyzes the page content, extracting the information it thinks is important. Parts of pages that get special consideration include titles, headings and "meta" information (which is hidden to most visitors but included specifically for the bot's benefit).
4. As part of the page analysis, the bot compiles a list of links to other pages. These links are added to the web crawler's "to-do list" of pages to crawl.
5. This extracted data is then stored in a complex database, which is like a very detailed and highly interconnected version of an index at the back of a book. The index tells the search engine what terms are prominent on which pages.

So, if we go back to our example search of "barbershop tee-shirts," here's what happens:

1. The search engine goes to its index and looks for indexed pages that have these terms in its text. It may, depending on the search engine, give additional "weight" to pages that feature the terms in headings (as defined by special formatting) or in hidden "meta" information.
2. The pages are given a "weight," or relevance ranking. Some search engines will look at other criteria, such as how many other pages link to a particular page, in coming up with their rankings. These pages, in order of their rankings, are known as "organic search results."
3. The search engines look to see if anyone is bidding on the search terms to place a targeted search engine ad, also known as "sponsored links" or "sponsor results."
4. The organic search results and sponsored results are displayed in the multi-page results set.

To a search engine user, the process is simple. You enter your search phrase, click "search" and the results pop up automagically. But as you can see, there's much more to the process. Understanding the process can help you become a better search engine "consumer." Even more importantly, this understanding can help you make better decisions about planning and executing an online marketing plan for your chorus or quartet.

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DriveTime
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Equinox
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