To understand search engines, you need to know about the crane truck & the Jack Russel …
To understand search engines, picture a crane truck and a Jack Russel:
CRANE TRUCKS
- Crane trucks are slow & strong & can move a lot of stuff.
- Crane trucks needs an address where to pick stuff up & drop stuff off.
- Crane trucks needs an date & time when they need to be at the address.
JACK RUSSEL
Fast, energetic and always on the search for something new.
All over the place
Never stop
HOW THE CRANE TRUCK & THE JACK RUSSEL BRING YOU SEARCH RESULTS?
The Jack Russel sets off searching for something new, come to your website and “sniff” at all your links. With every link he finds, he checks back to his owner (search engine) to see if this is something new and “marks” the new links. And by following the links, run off into the internet.
If there are no links pointing to your website, then the Jack Russel will never find you!
The crane truck is the big slow delivery vehicle doing most of the work. By following his to-do list of new links sniffed out by the Jack Russel it will:
- Visit every new link
- Analise the page and save its summary ( keywords, tags & links) to the database.
- It will allocate a value to that page based on its analysis (give it a score or page rank) and when you ask a search engine for a keyword or phrase it will return the pages with the best score relevant to where and who you are and rank them in descending order.
- Set a revisit date to check back if something in its summary of that page have changed & takes a “snapshot” of the page.
- If the page is revisited and changes was found to the content, it will set a revisit date closer than the last revisit date to make sure they have the latest and most up to date version of your page.
- If the page is revisited and no changes was found to the content, it will set a revisit date later / longer than the last revisit date, because if you do not update they do not need to update their summary. With every revisit that a page was not changed, the revisit date get pushed back longer and you relevancy to the keywords become less relevant and you will drop down in search results for that keyword.
KEEP THE JACK RUSSEL HAPPY, FEED IT NEW LINKS!
How do you keep the Jack Russel happy?
- Get in the routine to add a weekly article (with relevant keywords)
- Update your home page with news headlines to the new articles.
- Share your new article links to social media networks and post it with newsletters. The more places the Jack Russel can find a link back to your articles, the quicker the dump truck and do its job!!
- Get links to your website
AND PLEASE keep in mind this is a simplified version of how search engines work 🙂