Lesson 2 / 34
How Search Engines Work
Understanding crawling, indexing, and ranking to optimize for search visibility.
Crawling and indexing
Search engines use bots (crawlers) to visit web pages, follow links, and read content. The content is then stored in a massive index. If a crawler can't reach your page or parse its content, it won't be indexed — and won't appear in search results.
Ranking signals
Ranking depends on hundreds of signals: relevance, content quality, backlinks, page speed, mobile-friendliness, user experience and freshness. Google's Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) are part of page experience. The goal: rank for the queries your content answers.
Developers' role in search visibility
You control the technical signals: load time, mobile rendering, structured data, sitemap, robots.txt, and redirects. A site that's technically perfect but has poor content won't rank; one with great content but broken markup also won't rank. Both matter.