Page 4 - index

RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS

Search engines’

modus operandi

Search engines have become essential for doing busi- Some web pages are scanned and sorted daily or even
ness, since hardly any Internet user can dispense with hourly for new content, so that the databases of the
the use of search engines. Obviously, barely a user en- search engines are always up to date.
ters the URL directly into the browser or waives using a
search engines entirely. The majority starts their search Here, the robot of the search engine examines first of
by typing in a keyword as they often do not have the all a website, while following links (images and text
direct URL. Only sites such as Facebook, eBay or Ama- links). Then, the site is scanned and read page by
zon can enjoy having a great reputation, so that they page, and the texts and HTML elements are stored in
are mainly called up directly via their web address. interconnected databases. These in turn are then as-
sessed and indexed according to specific criteria.
Consumers in the Asian region spend, for instance, on
average 17 hours a month online, with Google being the What is scanned, which elements are important,
leading search site, as suspected, followed by Yahoo! - and what criteria will be considered?
but Tencent leading in visitor engagement. And alt-
hough Google is driving the share of search traffic in the The robot or spider is looking primarily for content that
Asia Pacific region, Baidu dominates the search land- it stores in the database of the search engine. HTML
scape in China and Navar in South Korea, according to elements are indexed to the furthest extent, however,
a study by Digital Portal. Flash content only partly and Java scripts and Java
Applets just little or not at all. That’s why search en-
The heaviest searchers in Asia are surprisingly the gines need a lot of text and good content. Websites
Thais, with 143.3 searches per user a month, outdoing with little text, but with a lot of graphics, are hardly no-
India and China that nevertheless have impressive 94.5 ticed by search engines. For search engine optimiza-
and 78.3 searches per user. tion (SEO), texts and meaningful keywords are there-
fore the alpha and omega to get top ranking. Websites
However, particularly popular in Asia Pacific is mobile with a high number of Likes, Shares and Tweets also
search, Digital Portal’s study revealed. Therefore, the have a better chance of a good ranking, making clear
search quality is amongst the highest ranked when it why creating content that gets shared often is becom-
comes to optimizing for mobile search as well. ing more important.

In fact, search traffic from mobile devices, such as How the various elements are assessed in detail by the
smartphones and tablets, are steadily on the rise and search engines is specified by the operators. Google,
have already exceeded search from computers. The for instance, has more than 200 criteria to assess the
report states, for instance, that there are more than 895 pages where the search results are displayed, the so-
million of mobile internet users in the region in 2014, called Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Some
and that number will keep growing to reach 1.29 billion ranking factors, which are used for the ranking of web
by 2016. pages, are kept a secret by search engine providers–
for good reasons – as there are some shady compa-
nies and individuals that try to manipulate search re-
What are search engines looking for and how?
sults.
Looking at such facts and figures, it is more interesting On the one hand, they use spamming, by flooding the
to find out how search engines work in the first place, search engines literally with senseless content. On the
don’t you think? Well, most search engines are index other hand, they try cloaking, which means that special-
based and browse the web by using automated pro- ly created pages should deceive the search engines.
grams, called web crawlers, robots or spiders. Thus, in Another dubious practice is the use of doorway pages,
case of a search request, not the entire network is where thousands of pages are generated that link to
scanned, but only the index.
each other. Most practices of spammers, however, are
already well known by search engines, allowing them to
The main principle of any search engine is generally prevent the cheating or punish the deceiver – some-
very similar, since search engines are in fact nothing times by completely deleting the website from the index
else than software programs that constantly comb of search engines. Therefore, beware from these prac-
through the Internet for qualitative content that is suita- tices and refrain from companies that offer to optimize

ble for the user. your website that way. ◊
4 Asian eMarketing September 2014 - Search Engine Marketing By Daniela La Marca