What is Search Engine Indexing and How Does It Affect Your Websites Pages In the Search Engines?

What is Indexing?

 

Search engine indexing is the concept of categorizing, collecting and storing pages within a search engines query in order to allow users to access web pages for future use. Indexing pages involves multiple factors including LSI (Linguistic Semantic Indexing), Cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics and computer science. Most search engines focus not only on indexing full text information but also, media types including: Video, Audio and Graphics. When you look at a search engine page or see images or videos in the Metadata. The full indexing of the content is what allows this information to appear to create a better experience for users.

 

What are some important factors to affect my index time?

 

Indexing content time depends on several factors. Some of these factors include: Size of content on page, Media on the Content, the amount of items already indexed for the current keyword or search term, as well as, the bandwidth of crawl bots already in use. Generally the more people link to your content or share your content on social media, the quicker it will get indexed within search. For example, if two people create the same article talking about the importance of xml sitemaps and have the same amount of text in the article and same media.

The article that is shared more on social media or mentioned will get indexed faster in the search engines. If you have heard of the term “going Viral” then you will understand why certain pages appear quicker in local search than others and get to the top of the search engine list faster. Simply by posting content to a relevant social media following help you index your content quicker. 

 

Types of Indexing Structures

 

There are multiple types of indexing structures that will change the speed and way your content is indexed in the search engines.

 

Suffix Tree:

 

Supports the indexing structure by storing the suffixes of keywords in the system. Such as the word Keyword, Key(prefix) Term (Suffix). This allows searches to recall information very quickly from a search engine but the only drawback is that requires significantly more space on behalf of the search engine to hold the memory necessary to recall information quickly for the user.

 

Citation Index

 

Stores citations and hyperlinks located in documents to support analysis of the contextual information shared between pages linked together.

 

Document-Term Matrix

 

This is used in latent semantic analysis, stores how many times words occur in a document in order to identify the keyword density of a content. This will help the search engine identify which content maybe more relevant to the user depending upon how relevant the search is to the content. 

 

Conclusion

 

Understanding some of these concepts will help you understand how your pages are indexed and the structures that support them, so they can be found by users in search. As you create content keep mind that there are certain factors that will make your content appear quicker than others and vice-versa. But the most important thing to keep in mind is that search engine indexing is an on-going process that is continuously being optimized by major search engines. So being aware of some of these indexing structures will help you consciencenly write and create better content to get indexed in local and national search engine keyword queries more effectively.