Understanding how search engines work can be helpful when you start optimizing your site for search. Here’s a brief overview and some additional resources for understanding search engines.

Search engines like Google and Bing use bots called crawlers or spiders to find and index content. These crawlers travel around the Internet through links and scan pages, adding pages to search engine’s indexes as they discover them. Once a page is part of a search engine’s index, it can appear in search results.

Search engines also assess pages to determine what they’re about and how useful they may be to users.

When a user searches something, search engines use various algorithms to determine which pages will be the most useful to the searcher and ranks them accordingly. These algorithms rank content based on more than 200 factors.

The role of SEO, then, is to optimize pages so that search engines:

• Find and index your pages
• Understand what your pages are about
• Assess them favorably and rank them highly based on the various ranking factors

Search engines want to rank the most useful content well, so essentially, SEOs want to make content as valuable to searchers as possible.

The goal is not to trick search engines into ranking your content highly. Trying to do so can lead to penalties that lower your rankings or prevent your site from ranking entirely. Instead, the goal is to make your content useful and relevant to searchers in alignment with search engine algorithms.