What is Search Engine Indexing ?
Before talking about Search Engine Indexing, let us consider a very simple example to understand the concept behind Search Engine Indexing. Pick up a book, open the last few pages to get to its Index and try to find any specific word in your book. What if the index is missing from the back of your book? You will then have to read all the content starting from the first page until you reach to the page where the required information is found.
What if search engines also worked the same way? It may take months or years to get the required information and yet you still can’t be assured of its usefulness and relevancy. Considering this, you can now understand the worth behind building a strong and efficient Index as well as the importance of search engine indexing for sites.
Now think of a library with more than 60 trillion books, a book having a few trillion pages, a big departmental store or a pharmacy store having more than 60 trillion drugs and medicines. You have been asked to get a specific item using some specific detail provided to you. We also require that whatever you get must be relevant as well as free from any spam.
Do you think this sounds easy? Let us move a step ahead and replace all the mentioned physical items with digital data. Think about the entire process once again and try to understand the complexity involved behind the operations performed during search engine indexing.
Practically, the success of Google lies at the root of their most efficient and quickest search engine indexing algorithms. Search engine indexing is the foundation of search engine optimization (SEO) due to which it becomes of great importance to us all.
Google Search Data
On an average, Google handles approximately 40,000 searches per second across the globe. It amounts to around 3.5 billion searches made every single day and around 1.2 trillion searches made in a year by Internet users. The frequency of Google searches are growing at an average rate of 10% on a yearly basis and as per current estimates, Google attracts as much as 80% of the total search volume across the globe.
Now you can better imagine the volume of data, size of online market, growing online business opportunities and of course the increasing competition. It is one of the primary reasons why the entire online industry is running behind implementing the best search engine optimization (SEO) techniques for their sites.
Importance of Search Engine Indexing
The above mentioned data was picked up from Internet Live Stats to get a glimpse of the huge volume of data and complexity that we are talking about. It also helps us understand the importance of search engine indexing behind the success of online businesses.
The importance of Search Engine Indexing can be better understood merely by considering the fact that the Internet consists of more than 60 trillion individual pages as revealed by Google in Google Inside Search story. Moreover, the figure is continuously growing at an incredible rate. Google has acclaimed itself as the best of the best search engines used worldwide to search the most relevant information across the Internet.
Search Engine Indexing is like maintaining a huge database of your most relevant keywords (metadata). It points to the actual location of content in its database so as to resolve search queries in the shortest given time.
Indexing is Similar to Data Inventory Management System
You can also consider a departmental store, a pharmacy or even your kitchen as they all are based on the same model. All of them involve a complex inventory management system in order to effectively store and retrieve items as and when required. Quick and efficient retrieval is entirely dependent on your storage strategy.
If you arrange the items based on some scientifically proven formula, it gets easier for you to get whatever you need in a matter of seconds. However, if you place the items haphazardly, it may take hours or even more for the retrieval of an item as and when required.
Search Engine Indexing Algorithms
Search Engine Indexing starts by crawling through more than 60 trillion website pages and posts in order to collect the information present all over the Internet. After collecting all the available data from the Internet, it has to be stored using the right technology and the right strategy. A well organised storage structure and a good storage methodology helps Google fetch the most relevant results in a matter of a few seconds. Google also fights the spam content during their intensive search process so as not to dilute the quality of its search results.
We get some of the most relevant results on top of Google SERP against our searched keywords. As you can understand, Google has developed its own search engine algorithms for an efficient search engine indexing procedure. Sites following Google guidelines not only get indexed quickly, but these sites also enjoy getting top ranks on Google SERP. It is all correlated to each other.
How does Google Index Websites ?
Google implements a well defined structure to index websites quickly. Google has also developed some of the most efficient search engine algorithms to parse the content placed on websites. The Ranking of a web page is highly dependent on your skills when matching the structure of your site with the indexing structure followed by Google. The Closer your site implements the Index structure used by Google, the quicker the indexing of your site.
Google Search Engine Indexing is an entirely automated process. There are Googlebots or spiders crawling over the Internet all the time. These bots and spiders are continuously collecting information from all over the Internet. The addition of fresh content on sites as well as updating and deleting of existing content on sites are recorded by Google.
Ideally, any fresh content added on a site gets included in Google Index while the deletion of any existing content from a site gets excluded from Google Index. Googlebots crawl, collect and submit all the collected information to Google search engines so that it can be indexed quickly and efficiently. Once your content is on the site, your pages and posts are indexed by Google and then the search engine algorithms start working on it to rank the sites based on a number of ranking factors.
Search Engine Indexing is the Foundation of SEO
Site owners, webmasters, SEO consultants, SEO analysts and several other SEO practitioners are working hard to get their sites and pages on top of Google SERP. You may wonder what exactly they are trying to do? If you have read the whole story on Search Engine Indexing attentively then it won’t be difficult for you to understand that they are simply trying to fix their sites based on Google guidelines. Professionally, we call it Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
How to Get Your Site Indexed Quickly by Google ?
Even you can do it yourself. Go through Google guidelines written for Webmasters and define your site structure as per the recommendations made by Google for making your site search engine friendly. Use the appropriate sitemap file, robots.txt file so that Googlebots can crawl your site without any trouble for quick indexing.
Never forget to activate your Google Authorship as it offers some great SEO value. Check it yourself, if your Google Authorship setup is successfully working or not. Mark your presence on Google Places, as well as Google Business for businesses delivering products or services from a physical location. The better the structure of your site, the faster it gets indexed but wait, this is not the end but rather a new beginning of the next process – Search Engine Optimization.
Search Engine Indexing is Merely A Beginning
Never forget that websites are made for HUMANS, not for MACHINES. Also remember that content is king and will remain the king forever, irrespective of how many algorithmic updates are rolled by Google in the future. There is no substitute for producing quality content. You must also use Social Media Marketing as a tool to circulate quality content to the world.
Indexing of your site merely means that you have gained an entry into a big auditorium. Your positioning in the auditorium is still dependent on several other ranking factors. Whether you get a seat in the front or the back is entirely dependent on how good you are at producing relevant content on your site for improving your end users’ experience. Keep spam out of your site or else Google will keep you out of its search engine index.
Start today and let me know if my expertise can help you get your site indexed quickly by Google. I will be happy to fix your site structure so that Google falls in love with your website at first sight.