The internet is huge, with new content – from websites to images to videos – published daily. Search engines like Google are a go-to for finding content that covers a topic of interest or answers a specific question.

This is why businesses, organizations, individuals, and publications need a web presence so they can surface in search engine results. Businesses that want to sell a product or provide information online rely on search engines to direct their target audience to their websites. But for this to happen, content must be optimized so it rises to the top of search results, and this requires following some important best practices. 

• Learn How to Use SEO 

A search engine organizes information that is stored on the web. When an internet user types in a query, a search engine provides a list of websites that best satisfy that query. It’s an easy way to sift through the infinite amount of content online.

Google is the most popular search engine, with YouTube, Microsoft Bing and even Amazon serving as other important examples, according to Search Engine Journal. Google explains that its goal is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google generates results using algorithms that consider factors such as the words in the query, the content on different web pages, the expertise of sources on those pages, and your language and location.

“A search engine is what helps you sort through all of that to find what you’re looking for – the answer to your question or the information that you need,” says Vanessa Fox, CEO of Keylime Toolbox, an SEO metrics and analytics company, and author of “Marketing in the Age of Google.” “The search engine basically takes everything available on the web, figures out what’s most relevant and quality and useful for what you typed in, and gives you a list of things to choose from.”

Search engines have systems that “crawl” the web to access and extract the content and then store it in an index, Fox says. An index is a list of all the web pages a search engine knows about. Search engines also analyze data associated with each webpage – for instance, how popular it is and what other websites are linking to it – to better understand the page, she says.

Another search engine process works to determine the intent of the query by looking at historical search data. For example, the search engine factors in what other users have clicked on when searching the same query and what they may have searched for next. 

• How Search Engines Make Money

Search engines make money primarily by selling advertisements.

“Search engines provide a free service, but a portion of each page has ads on it,” says Neil Patel, chief marketing officer at NP Digital, a performance marketing agency. “A small percentage of people click on those ads, but that’s enough to make them a lot of money.”

Site structure: This is how a website is organized and presented, including how its homepage and webpages are interconnected and grouped.

XML sitemaps: This is a list of all the pages on your website, similar to a directory for the site.

Robots.txt: Search engines use these files to determine what pages to crawl and not to crawl. This is important for websites with restricted access. For example, a financial company may publish reports for customers to view with a login, Patel says.

Duplicate content: This is content found on your webpage that has also been published on another website.

Site speed: This refers to how fast your website loads.

Don’t Neglect Linking and Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is content on other websites that links to your site, and it’s out of your website manager’s control. Off-page SEO can either help or hurt a page’s ranking in search results, Spencer says. more for a robot than for a human.

“As they get more and more sophisticated because of machine learning and all that, you have to continue to innovate,” Spencer says.

Google makes hundreds of algorithmic changes per year, most of which address more minor faults.

Sometimes, Google will make broad core updates, which are bigger changes to the main search algorithm that tend to have a greater impact on webpage rankings. In some cases, broad core updates are announced by the company.

“You can’t control the algorithms,” Patel says. “Sometimes you’re on the benefitting side, sometimes you’re on the losing side of the update. But if you keep cranking, in the long run you should see great results for SEO.”

• Search Features

Beyond the list of organic links, features often appear in search results that offer additional types of data. For example, a local maps box may appear if a search engine determines a query, such as “coffee shops near me,” has local intent. Fox says search features may also include images and videos; recipes; “People Also Ask” modules; and product ratings, prices and availability.

Search features don’t change the order of websites in search results, though these websites may get fewer clicks when the search features give users the information they need.

“In SEO, you’re competing against not just the other organic listings but everything else on the page that is potentially going to drive the user, the searcher, to those things instead of to you,” Spencer says.