With Google now processing an average of 40,000 search queries every second, how do you determine which blue link to select on your search? Have you ever heard the phrase "don't judge a book by it's cover?" Well the Internet is like an ever-growing library with billions of books and you should view your website's domain as an online sales representative for your brand. If you want your business to shine amongst the rest, consider how Google indexes its pages and presents the most relevant blue links for your query.
In order to understand indexed pages, you must understand how Google internally sifts and sorts its data library. To put it simply, when you type a string of keywords or a question into a search engine like Bing or Yahoo , what you're essentially doing is searching their index, or library, of stored information for the answer. Each search engine uses a different systematic process for sorting it's web pages, otherwise known as search engine crawlers. Google specifically uses web crawlers to discover publicly available webpages. Crawlers will look at webpages and will follow the links on those pages, much like a user would do. As they move from link to link they bring data about those webpages back to the Google server. Google uses 'spiders' to search webpage after webpage for sites with the most relevance to your query. The end results are links to thousands of web pages stored across hundreds of machines. Even before a customer searches the internet, web crawlers gather these information points from across hundreds of billions of web pages and organize it in the search index.
In order to organize information into indexed pages, crawlers find a webpage and the Google systems render the content of the page, just as a browser does. Google will take note of key signals like keywords and website freshness and then keeps track of it in the search index. The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions of webpages. It's like the index in the back of a book — with an entry for every word seen on every web page that is indexed. Once a page is indexed, essentially, for every word it contains, it has been added to the corresponding entries. But how does a search engine like Google determine what are the most relevant links to provide you? Google considers the following when providing results:
How may times does this page contain your keywords?
Do the words appear in the title? URL?
Does the page include synonyms for those words?
Is the information for this page of low or high quality?
What is this pages pagerank?
Each website with these positive matches is given a rank and then shown on your search engine results page. This system is done extremely quickly. In fact, this system has gotten so efficient that in 1999, it took Google one month to crawl and build an index of about 50 million pages and in 2012, the same task was accomplished in less than one minute. Today, a search rendering relevant and trustworthy blue links is all done within a second after your query is posted.
If you want to increase your business's indexed pages, focus on ensuring that each page on your site has high-quality content that users will find valuable. Focus on creating and distributing remarkable content that will get your pages indexed and ranked, get your website visitors, and turn those visitors into leads from organic search traffic. To do this, local SEO can optimize your content to make it fresh and easily available to searchers. Your businesses listings information ensures that your content is accurate and consistent across channels while optimization on local pages is crucial for the growing number of "near me" searchers.
If you're looking for a marketing company who can turn your brand into one of the most up-to-date, clean and highly searched domains on the web, check out The Yext Answers Platform and learn about when it comes to how consumers experience your brand, your website is only the beginning. Yext puts every customer engagement to work for your brand — no matter where it takes place — and drives more business online and off with the Yext platform. Check how your business appears online by visiting www.yext.com.