SEO: Three essential terms to know about Google that benefit your online business

These three terms describe how Google identifies and sorts the content of billions of web pages that just keep growing in number - every day. You want potential customers to find you, so take the time to learn these three terms. They are the foundation of any SEO effort that's done correctly.

How does “Crawling” benefit my business?

Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. A googlebot is a software that travels the web and reviews almost all of the existing web pages and files on web servers.

They use a huge set of computers to fetch (or "crawl") billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.

Google's crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and they keep the search side of their business separate from our revenue-generating AdWords service.

Where does "Indexing" take place?

Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, Google processes information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, they cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

How is "Pagerank" determined?

When a user enters a search request, Google servers search the index for matching pages and return the results Google believes are the most relevant to the user’s request. 

Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.

In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it's important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. Their Webmaster Guidelines outline some best practices that can help you avoid common pitfalls and improve your site's ranking.

Google's Autocomplete features are designed to help users save time by displaying related terms, common misspellings, and popular queries. Like google.com search results, the keywords used by these features are automatically generated by Google web crawlers and search algorithms. Google displays these predictions only when they think they might save the user time. If a site ranks well for a keyword, it's because Google has determined algorithmically that the page content is more relevant to the user's search request.

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Cheers, Steu

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