Hey everyone! We're going to talk about Google today. Being ranked highly in Google searches is really important for driving traffic to your website, so today I want to go over the tools that Google uses to rank webpages and relevance.

It's a lot of work to scan and index the entire internet, so Google uses two tools that I've gone over before to make it possible - machine learning and caching. The first part, machine learning, is what you know as their "algorithm," just like Facebook's or Instagram's. Google's works a bit differently though - where social media platforms tailor their algorithms around interaction, Google largely tailors its algorithms around content. Keywords, meta tags, external links - these all contribute to how relevant Google thinks your website is to any given search term. Google is constantly improving and updating its algorithm, too - every time you search something, your choices of links are being monitored, and Google later uses that data to further refine what exactly its algorithm believes you want to see. This monitoring also means that Google doesn't have to use the same results for someone else that it would for you, even with the same search term - the algorithm can be trained with your data to maximize relevance for you specifically.

If that sounds like a lot of processing to do for the entire internet, for every person in the world - that's because it is. While Google is constantly updating its algorithm, it simply doesn't have the resources to always look through every webpage on the internet. Because of this, Google will periodically crawl webpages - generally around once a month - and cache the data that they need. This allows them to look it up much more quickly in the future, rather than having to re-analyze each website every single time. By reducing down and storing only the data that they need, Google can effectively rank every single webpage, for every single person using it. This is why, when you're making significant updates to your webpage for SEO, it's important to re-index the pages that you've updated so that Google has an accurate cache in its sytem.