When a person goes online to search for information on a product or service, they will type in a certain keyword or phrase specific to their hunt. It is the search engines that will sort through all the pages indexed and present the searcher with relevant results. If you would like the searcher to find you in the top listings, it is best to learn how these search engines actually work and how they will present information to the customer initiating the search.
There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.
Search engines use spiders to index websites. In order to have a search engine spider index the pages on your site, you need to submit each page into the required submission page of the search engine. A spider is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. What the spider does is visit the website, reads the content on the site along with the site's meta tags, and also follows the links with which the site connects to. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. Every link on your site that the spider follows, it will index the information found there as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so it is best not to create a site containing a number like 500 pages.
Depending on how the moderators of the search engine are set up, the spiders will return periodically to your site to check for new information. A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during it search. It may index up to a million pages a day.
Search engine examples are: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, and Google.
When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index it has created and not actually searching the Web. Depending on which search engine you are using to find information, you will receive sites with different page ranks due to the various algorithms each search engine uses to index.
A search engine algorithm will scan for artificial "keyword stuffing" or "spamdexing" as well as the frequency and location of keywords on a web page. The algorithms also analyze the way that pages link to other pages on the web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linking pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.
If you are a new site looking to increase your ranking, linking to a well established website which has content relevant to yours will help your ranking until you can build up your own ranking higher. Choosing a site that has a PR (page rank) of 7 is much better than linking to a site that is a PR1. As you build up your links, improve your keyword density, and add new content your visitors and ranking will rise in the search engine listings.
Melanie Bremner is a work at home mom who creates and teaches lessons for other stay at home parents looking to learn to make money online without a big start up cost.
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