What is a search engine?

A search engine is everyone's best friend. It is the place where Internet users can look up specific pages. Think of it as a large table of contents of the World Wide Web. Based on the search query, the search engine directs the searcher to pages that are relevant to this. In this way, one quickly finds the information one is looking for. There are many different search engines, but the market leader is Google. 

Google is so popular and known worldwide that different verb forms have been created by the use of this word. So nowadays we 'google' all over the place and nobody is surprised if you just consult Google. However, there are also other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo. It is wise to tackle the biggest fish in the sea first. That way you will score enough points to beat the rest of the search engines. Focus on Google and the findability of your website on the entire World Wide Web will improve. Thanks to search engine marketing or search engine optimisation, you can make your website more visible in the search results. 

Definition of a search engine 

The search engine, also known as Search Engine, was created in the early nineties. That was the moment when the Internet slowly became more important in our society. In the very beginning, there were of course not as many websites as there are now, but there were more and more. This made it all the more difficult to find your way around the vast web. At that time, search engines were launched for the first time. They were not yet as advanced as they are now, but they were good precursors to what we now see with Google. 

Google, however, was the clever market leader that developed an advanced algorithm to classify pages according to quality and relevance. This produced even better results and made it easier for people to find the information they were looking for. This is how Google first came up with their PageRank algorithm. 

How does search engine visibility work? 

Nobody knows exactly how Google's algorithm works. However, it is clear that a few factors are important for the visibility within search engines. The website must be of clear quality. A 404 page, for example, is already detrimental to quality. Also the speed, the use of keywords, the length of the pages and the use of (preferably unique) images is important. 

In order to become more visible within the search engines, it is important to think about SEO. This is all about optimising the website in order to improve the user experience of the Internet user and to be found faster in search engines.