Search engines are a complex thing and describing how they work when it comes to SEO will take much longer than one articles but I want to give you a rough idea on their purpose in order to help you to understand how search engine optimisation works.  Basically, search engines such as Google use different programmes to identify what a web page is offering in order to rank them in the appropriate way. If you imagine that the Internet as a whole is a large book, the search engines are the index at the back of the book that summarise the meaning of the book. If you want to look for a specific term or word in an index it is the same as putting a specific phrase or word into the search engines and to go even further, you can liken the page numbers in a book to the hyperlinks used.

Computer programmes may be intelligent but they do not work in the same way as humans when it comes to indexing. Computer programmes don’t understand the meaning of words but they do understand how to index them where they are programmed to index them to. Google is by far the world leader in the world of search engines and it works by using algorithms that understand that when a website is linking to a different page, it sends out the message that the page that is being linked to is relevant to what keywords and phrases are being used. A link is similar to a vote or a reference as it is giving a web page recognition for what it is offering.

So, search engines don’t yet understand the actual meaning of a word but they do comprehend the types of words and the patterns that appear when it comes to repeat use. This is all about keywords. For example if I wrote: “I love the steaks offered at TGI Fridays” and added a link to TGI Fridays, the search engines would recognise that the phrase I used was related to TGI Friday and that it was relevant to that particular site, even though it would not know what the term actually meant. Taking this one step further you will start to understand the relevance of the other search terms such as ‘steaks offered’ as because they appear in the same phrase as TGI Fridays a search engine will then associate the phrase with the website so if it is repeatedly used in searches, search engines will count these as keywords for the TGI Fridays website.

This is put in much simpler terms than the process actually entails but you should be starting to form more of an idea of how the search engines work. There are many more factors that search engines take into consideration when they are ranking web pages and experts believe there are as many as 50 to 200. Here at the UK SEO agency, we understand the search engines and how to appeal to their spiders to create web pages that rank highly as well as read well., something that many so called SEO specialists don’t take into consideration.