How Search Engines Work and Setting Up Google Search Console

Watch this short video from Google on How Search Works

While there are many search engines to choose from, we will focus mainly on Google and its toolkit (Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Google Trends, Google Search Console etc.) and Microsoft Bing.  Google is the most popular search engine and has the most market share both in Canada (92%) and overall globally.  If you have a solid understanding of Google’s processes, you’ll be in a good position to understand how the other search engines work, since they have set themselves up in a similar fashion

How do search engines work?

Search engines allow web users to search the web for content.  A search engine uses “spiders” or “bots” to crawl the web to create indexes (databases) of text associated with specific webpages (e.g. titles, headings, image descriptions, meta tags, etc.). When someone enters a search term or query into the search bar, the search engine analyses the keyword or phrase matches it to the indexed text ranks the matched text relevance to the search query using a mathematical formula or algorithm and then publishes a ranked list of results/links to the relevant pages. So what is surprising to many is that when you use a search engine, the service isn’t searching the website but instead looking in its database of stored information (the index).

Optional reading: https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/

What do SEM and SEO refer to?

• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a term used to describe the various means of marketing a website via search engines and generally refers to paid search strategies.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a term used to describe the various means of optimizing the unpaid or “organic” rankings determined by each search engine’s algorithms.

Google Search Console – Ensure your website has been indexed

To see if your website has been indexed by Google, set up an account for your website using the free Google Search Console.  As you progress through the course we will illustrate how to leverage this free Google tool.

Let’s go over next how Google’s Search Results appear and then we will learn more about how they get ranked.