A Look Inside Search Engines
October 21, 2009 by nicholas halmond
Filed under Basic SEO Tips
Understanding search engines and how they work will help you to better understand how to use them. If you can grasp the ideas and the concepts of search engines then you are on the right path to being able to put them to use for you. Search engines can be rather confusing, but through a direct and simple explanation you should be able to get the basic understanding you need to know how search engines work and think.
As you no doubt already know, search engines are used to index websites and web pages. In other words, search engines regularly scan the Internet for content and then index websites and web pages accordingly. This is why a person can enter certain criteria into the search box, and once they hit the enter key, they are supplied with hundreds of thousands of results.
The first basic function of a search engine is to crawl the web, and in order to do this, the search engines make use of highly sophisticated software commonly referred to as a crawler or spider. These crawlers or spiders will follow the millions of links which are present on the web. However, you need to bear in mind that the crawlers are only able to scan for text. In other words they are unable to recognize videos, java script, or in fact anything which is password protected.
Once the crawler or spider has done its work, the gathered information is then indexed. The index is like a large database and is serves as the main information bank for the search engine to use when internet users do a search. Within the index, keywords or keyword phrases are used to assign each web page and website to specific search terms that internet users may use. This is where the websites and web pages are ranked and organized into the order they will appear in the search results.
The next step is the actual search which a user does. Considering that you’ve more than likely used a search engine to find information you’ve been looking for, you’ll be aware of the fact that when you type in your search and press the enter key, you are presented with thousands or even millions of results. This is because the search engines have taken your search criteria and compared it to the data they have in the data base. Of course, each of the search engines has their own ways through which to determine whether a website ranks highly or not. This is achieved by means some of complex algorithms, and once the process is complete, the user is presented with the results.
Each search engine is different. When you search for a term on two different search engines, you will likely get two different results. This is due to the algorithms used by each search engine. Algorithms weigh different factors, like keyword density, links and meta tags. Some factors are given more weight, meaning they are considered more important, by one search engine than another. To make things more complicated, search engines often change their algorithms.
Of course when you decide to optimize a web page for the search engines, it can be extremely advantageous if you know which algorithms the search engines use. This is why SEO (search engine optimization) has basically become a science nowadays, simply because it’s vital for successful Internet marketing. Basically, SEO involves adding fresh content to your website or web page regularly, and it means that you’ll continuously have to be making certain changes in order to maintain a high ranking for your specific keyword and keyword phrase.
Understanding how search engines work and how they rank websites can be a major help in SEO. You will have to continuously keep up on SEO for your website, though. As mentioned, search engines are always changing their criteria for ranking websites, so you need to be changing with them in order to ensure you stay ranked high.
Nicholas Halmond is a search engine marketing specialist and a rep from Rank Fast. If you would like to learn more about SEO check out SEO Services.
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