Search engines are the muscle behind the Internet. They are the single largest driving force in bring you and your business traffic. So it is very import to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating each search.

When it is boiled down to it there are basically two types of search engines. The first is search by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines like Google use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. With the help of a ‘spider’ an automated program run by the search engine system. The spider visits a website, read the content on each page, the site’s Meta tags and also follow any of the links that the site connects to. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository of clearing house of data, where the data it is then indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index each of those sites as well. Some spiders will only index up to a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t jump the gun and create a site with 500 pages!

That spider will then periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine. The more frequent the information is updated the more likely the spider will return to search again.

A spider acts kind of 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 its search, and this process may index up to a million pages a day. So don’t copy content.

Example:  Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you search on Google looking for it to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. This is were people are purposely trying to add in more specific keywords in the attempt to trick the search engine. The algorithms analyzes the way that pages link to other pages in 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 linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page and so on.

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