A Look Inside Search Engines
The only way you’ll ever understand how to use a search engine effectively is by first making a point of understanding how they work. In other words, you need to get a grip on the fundamental concepts of the various search engines before you’ll be able to use them to your advantage. As you no doubt already know, search engines can be immensely confusing, but providing you’re willing to delve a little deeper in order to get a basic understanding, you’ll soon begin to realize just how they work.
Search engines are used to catalog all the websites and web pages on the internet. Search engines are programs that scan for information, content, in order to categorize it. When an internet user enters a search term and presses enter, they will then get pages of relevant websites and web pages that match their search query.
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 spider has finished crawling the web, the information which was gathered is then indexed in a huge database which of course functions as an information bank. When users make use of the search function, the search engines will use this information bank in order to supply results. Within the framework of this index, several key words and keyword praises are utilized in order to relate web pages and web sites to specific search terms. Essentially, this is where your website gets ranked, and this is of course what determines where about your website will appear in search results.
The next thing that happens is the search by an internet user. You have probably used a search engine to find information, so you know that you type a term into the search engine, press enter and you get pages of results. The search engine will take the term you enter, compare it to the database and process the search request. Each search engine has its own way to process and figure which websites and web pages match your search term. These are called algorithms. Once the search engine has processed the request the results are returned to you and you get the pages of relevant websites and web pages.
Because all the search engines use different algorithms, you will get different results from all of them even if your search term is identical. This is mostly due to the fact that different algorithms tend to place more emphasis on different factors, and while some may view keyword density as the most important factor, others for example may consider links or meta tags to be more important. Just to make matters even more confusing, all the major search engines change their algorithms regularly.
When you are optimizing your website or web page for the search engines, it helps to know what algorithms the search engine uses. Search Engine Optimization or SEO, is a major part of internet marketing. It involves adding content, changing website setup and doing any tweaks needed to help get your website or web page ranked high on the search engines for your chosen keyword or 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 Representative from Rank Fast. If you would like to learn more about SEO check out SEO Services.