Tag Archives: search engines

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Webmaster Academy: How Search Works

One of the topics I discuss at my Agency Internet Boot Camp is how search engines actually work. It is an important topic if you want your agency website to appear higher in search results.

First, your site needs to be “discovered” and comprehended by search engines, and understanding the fundamentals of how search works can help. Google has lots of computers that continually visit and analyze Web pages. These computers are collectively known as Googlebot. They give Googlebot an initial set of sites, and then send it out to visit those sites. It scans the content, and then follows links to other sites or pages that it finds. It then repeats the process on each page it lands on, and continues to spider out, hence the term “spidering” or “crawling,” which many use to refer to a search engine’s discovery process.

When Googlebot visits a page, it downloads and stores a copy (called a “cached” page) to their index. It analyzes each page, noting the words and any other relevant content. Googlebot understands some types of content, like text, better than others, like images or Flash (you can find some ways to make these better understood in Webmaster Academy). In order to perform well when customers search for you, it’s important that Googlebot can access and understand the content of your website.

Each time someone searches on Google, ranking algorithms draw up a list of relevant pages from the index of information that Googlebot has saved while “crawling” the web. This list is given back as the Google Search results page. To see if your website is included in Google’s index, you can use the site search operator, restricting search results to your site’s domain. For example a search for [site:youtube.com ] would only show results from the website youtube.com.

For a more visual look at Google Search, check out the How Search Works video below. If you’re interested, there’s a lot more to learn that’ll help you build your online presence at the Webmaster Academy.

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Google Insights for Search

Google provides many tools that can help you understand Web searches. Google Insights provides you with all kinds of information about any keyword/phrase in which you are interested. You’ll find out how searches for that keyword/phrase peak and ebb over time, where geographically that search is most popular, and what other keyword/phrases are used to conduct similar searches.

For example, at the time of this writing, we tested the tool using the phrase “Insurance Agent.” Google Insights revealed that the use of this phrase has been relatively constant over the last several years. This tool also shows by state how much this search term is used. One of the rising search terms is “insurance agent jobs” and “insurance agent careers.” In other words, more people today are searching for jobs in the industry.

How can you make use of this data? By learning what people are searching for, you can customize your Web site by adding these terms. That way, your site will become more visible to these searchers. This information will help you better understand the information your target prospects are looking for.

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Google Trends

One way to maximize your Web site’s visibility on Google is to understand what words people use to search for information. That’s just what the Google Trends tool does. It shows you the most popular searches on Google in any given hour, plus a list of related news articles and blog posts that support the rise and fall of the traffic surges. If any of them affects your business, you’ll see it first here and will be able to react faster.

You can click on any of the keywords to learn more, including the hourly volume of searches, whether popularity is going up or down and (in some cases) where, geographically, the majority of the searches are coming from. You can also enter your own keywords to see where that search stands over a selected period of time. To access the tool, simply go to www.google.com/trends.

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Tools for Finding People on the Web

FindMeOn is a profile management service that connects online identities across social networks, blogs, and photo sharing sites. This is a meta-social network that you can use to update all your sites simultaneously. You can hide select profiles from coworkers or family and use identity controls to share only the content you want.

PeekYou is a site that enables users to search for people by first and last name, username, tags, or location. The aggregated profile pages contain bios and links to blogs and social networks. They also have modules for RSS feeds, so you can see what people are saying on their blogs and on Twitter.

Pipl, a people search engine, crawls deeper than most to include social networks, blogs, and publicly available information such as addresses, birthdays, SEC filings, court records, patents, and more.

Spock aggregates a person’s profile by crawling blogs, photo sharing sites, and social networking profiles. Users can vote on tags used to describe you.

Wink searches for people by name, location, school, work, and interest by crawling social network sites. The site plans to also start crawling blogs, photos, and general Web pages. You can create and share your own Wink profile.

Backgroundchecks  the Internet’s premier resource and database for everything related to Public Records, both online and off. Everyday, our Researchers add new resources to help you find the information you’re looking for.

Zoominfo is a business information search engine. It delivers comprehensive, easy to read profiles of 37 million people and 3.5 million companies. Search for prospects using targeted criteria including title, company name, location, industry, and company size. ZoomInfo delivers the business information you can’t find anywhere else, such as the person’s work history, educational background, and board memberships.

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New Type of Search Engine

While Google continues to capture the majority of Web searches, there are many specialized search engines that are worth knowing about and using. The Tampa, Fla.-based RedZee is one example. The company says their technology makes it possible to produce the top 100 Web pages that match queries, instead of the conventional top 10 search results found on Google and other text-based search engines.

RedZee Search 2.0 displays search results as fanned Web page images. You can quickly peruse the search results by simply mousing over the images and then clicking on the Web site you want to see.

“We believe pictures are worth a thousand words, and we’re bringing that philosophy to our search engine,” says John Stewart, president of RedZee Search. “Visuals make it so much easier to see what you like rather than read what you like.”

Almost 85% of searchers settle for what they find on that first page, even if they didn’t find exactly what they were looking for. Although desired results are more than likely buried deep in the list, most people do not have the time or the patience to read through page after page of text-based listings. RedZee Search still uses text, meta tags, and other text-based tools to scan Web pages to match search criteria. But instead of producing the results in text format, they’re listed visually.