How Search Engines Work: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Changes can take a few months to take effect and algorithms change regularly. It’s advisable to look at your SEO rankings routinely even if you rank highly in search. If you’re still feeling stuck, consider bringing on an SEO specialist for further improvement. Adding keywords to your URL helps explain your page content to search engines and users, as well as reflecting where the page sits in your website. For example, squarespace.com/pricing helps search engines categorize the page as a plan pricing page and makes the page content clear for browsers before they even click through. These metrics not only provide insights into the effectiveness of your website and content strategy but also offer valuable clues on how to enhance your user experience and engagement.

And if that happens often enough, Google will downrank you for that keyword. Specifically, before I write a single word, I figure out my target keyword’s Search Intent. On the other hand, this keyword isn’t super competitive, has a high CPC and gets a decent number of searches every month. That way, I get my content in front of people that are actually going to buy. But those high CPC values tell me that those folks have SOME commercial intent.

This guide will help you become more data-driven in your SEO efforts. Rather than haphazardly throwing arrows all over the place (and getting lucky every once in a while), you’ll put more wood behind fewer arrows. Before you do any of that, you have to first understand your website’s goals BHS Links to execute a strategic SEO plan.

For more accurate results, monitor and use the Index Coverage report in Google Search Console. You can sign up for a free Google Search Console account if you don’t currently have one. With this tool, you can submit sitemaps for your site and monitor how many submitted pages have actually been added to Google’s index, among other things. These types of links are often ignored, and can even get you penalized. In general, the easier a link is for anyone to get, the less likely Google is to value it. Make sure you don’t have “orphaned” pages – pages that aren’t linked to from anywhere else on your site.

Regular Content Updates

Custom SEO plans address specific challenges and provide targeted solutions for your business. Technical SEO is about making your website work well for search engines. It focuses on improving your site’s structure, speed, and functionality. When search engines like Google can easily crawl and index your site, your rankings improve.

SEO tools – which ones do I need?

SEO works because search engines reward helpful content and great user experiences. When determining how high to rank a particular page on your site, Google doesn’t just look at that one page. As such, building your brand reputation by optimizing your listings, gaining positive press, and asking for reviews is essential for SEO. Much of this falls under the realm of local SEO but there are plenty of brand-buiding strategies that apply to non-brick-and-mortar businesses too. Backlinks, or links to your site from other websites, are the third most important Google ranking factor. Backlinks from higher credibility sites are, of course, more valuable than those from lower credibility sites.

• Mangools is known for its user-friendly design, providing a suite of tools that include KWFinder, SERPChecker, and SERPWatcher, ideal for freelancers or small teams.
• This information is stored through indexing, ensuring your pages appear in search results if they meet quality standards.
• But thanks to this new algorithm, Google could now understand the topic of your page.
• SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a set of practices designed to improve the visibility and ranking of web pages in search engine results.
• E-E-A-T (aka Double-E-A-T) is a set of guidelines that Google’s quality raters use to assess the quality of search results.

Calculating the number of links pointing to any given site helped them do this. This tactic made for terrible user experiences, and instead of laughing at funny jokes, people were bombarded by annoying, hard-to-read text. It may have worked in the past, but this is never what search engines wanted. How do search engines ensure that when someone types a query into the search bar, they get relevant results in return? That process is known as ranking, or the ordering of search results by most relevant to least relevant to a particular query.

Today you’re going to learn EXACTLY how to improve your site’s ranking in 2025. Effective communication and support are crucial when working with an SEO agency. You should know exactly what they are doing to improve your website’s rankings. Analytics tools help you track how people interact with your website. They show which pages get the most traffic, where visitors come from, and what actions they take.

To determine relevance, search engines use algorithms, a process or formula by which stored information is retrieved and ordered in meaningful ways. These algorithms have gone through many changes over the years in order to improve the quality of search results. Check out our Google Algorithm Change History for a list of both confirmed and unconfirmed Google updates going back to the year 2000. Website SEO involves optimizing websites built on the WordPress platform, focusing on plugins, content, and technical aspects to enhance search engine visibility and user experience. Just like with websites, a personalized URL helps with both LinkedIn and external search engine ranking.

PageRank estimates the importance of a web page by measuring the quality and quantity of links pointing to it. The assumption is that the more relevant, important, and trustworthy a web page is, the more links it will have earned. Meta directives (or “meta tags”) are instructions you can give to search engines regarding how you want your web page to be treated. 5xx errors are server errors, meaning the server the web page is located on failed to fulfill the searcher or search engine’s request to access the page. In Google Search Console’s “Crawl Error” report, there is a tab dedicated to these errors.