If you can think back far enough, you will remember a time when things were not all organized for consumers on the Internet. If you were looking for a plumber or someone to fix your roof, you would scroll through the phone book or Yellow Pages, or if you had a fact you wanted to prove to a friend, you had to find an Encyclopedia to dig through to find what you were looking for. While the World Wide Web has only been a go-to for consumers for around 30 years, we have been using directories for much longer (though we can all agree it is much easier to have answers in seconds when we search for something on the Internet!) Essentially, this is what search engine indexing is: putting information from your website into a directory so it is available for the next consumer who comes looking for something.
Search engines are able to run so fast because their crawlers have indexed (organized) relevant information into categories. Most search engines use what is called a reverse index. A reverse index allows a database of text elements to be compiled alongside pointers to the documents which contain the specified elements. Then, search engines utilize a process that reduces words to their core meaning. This considerably reduces the amount of tools that are needed to store and retrieve data from a website. Rankings on search engine result pages are then determined through an algorithm that examines exactly how many links are pointing at a specific page to try and narrow down results to the most relevant sites only.
If you are unsure of where your site ranks on search engine results pages or how to get it to index better so you can outperform yourself, contact Your Web Pro LLC. Our SEO services are designed to do just that: optimize your website content so it is indexed highly by search engine crawlers.