It's been a few months since our last share of our work-in-progress rewrite of the Beginner's Guide to SEO, but after a brief hiatus, we're back to share our draft of Chapter Two with you! This wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Kameron Jenkins[1], who has thoughtfully contributed her great talent for wordsmithing throughout this piece.
This is your resource, the guide that likely kicked off your interest in and knowledge of SEO, and we want to do right by you. You left amazingly helpful commentary on our outline[2] and draft of Chapter One[3], and we'd be honored if you would take the time to let us know what you think of Chapter Two in the comments below.
Chapter 2: How Search Engines Work – Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking
First, show up.
As we mentioned in Chapter 1, search engines are answer machines. They exist to discover, understand, and organize the internet's content in order to offer the most relevant results to the questions searchers are asking.
In order to show up in search results, your content needs to first be visible to search engines. It's arguably the most important piece of the SEO puzzle: If your site can't be found, there's no way you'll ever show up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).
How do search engines work?
Search engines have three primary functions:
- Crawl: Scour the Internet for content, looking over the code/content for each URL they find.
- Index: Store and organize the content found during the crawling process. Once a page is in the index, it’s in the running to be displayed as a result to relevant queries.
- Rank: Provide the pieces of