SEO for Beginners - Part 2 - Crawling and Indexing

In Part 1, we have discussed about what is organic search, SERPs, etc. Now here's the important question. How search engines find the web pages? How are they organized?

There are two main process which helps the search engine to find web pages and store them so that it can retrieve the pages when you search for that particular page. They are crawling and indexing.

Crawling

This process is done by algorithms that are pre-defined by the search engines. These algorithms are more often called as web spiders or bots or crawlers. These web spiders crawl on web pages based on many factors such as Page Rank, back links and several other constraints. Well, what is a page rank? back link? We will see all these in subsequent parts. For now, crawlers are automatic bots used by search engines to crawl on webpages to find the information on it. So, why is crawling necessary? The answer

Indexing

Once the spiders crawl over the web pages, they are then arranged or indexed in the search engine databases. Once you make a query (you search for something), the search engine returns the specific pages which matches the your query from already indexed web pages.

For Google, if you want to index a page that you find good, you can do it by copying the URL of that particular page and click "submit" by following this link https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url

To know about Google crawling and indexing, view this video.