Search Engines

    Search Engines, you learn about how major search engines reach their market and influence a majority of internet users to avail of their products. Also, in this portion, the importance of having a rank for your site is explained.

  • Search Engines
    • Basics of Search Engines
      • Introduction to Search Engines
      • Search Engine Market Share
      • Major search engines and directories
      • How Search Engines Index and Rank Pages
      • Search engine crawlers, spiders or bots
    • Importance of Search Engine Optimization
    • Difference between search engine positioning, optimization and marketing

How Search Engines Index and Rank Pages

    Before we can discuss how search engines end up with lists of pages based on the search query of a user, here are a few basic steps on how a search engine operates whenever a web surfer types in the keywords of interest.

    What happens when a person makes a search? How does the search engine show its stuff?

    First, the search engine does a little web crawling via a browser referred to as a spider in search engine jargon. The spider checks out the content of the web page and analyzes this content to find out how that specific site can be indexed. The spider can search through the paragraphs, headers, or even meta tags of that site as set by the webmaster.

    Next, indexing simply means that the search engine takes note of what has been crawled over by the spider on your site, storing it in a virtual database. If the elements of the site are made in such a way that spiders find them easily, next time a search query is made, that site will be put into consideration when listings of results are to be made.

    When a web surfer types in a search query in the text box, the search engine looks through its index and makes a list of the sites that have the most relevant content. How the sites appear on the list, depends on how well SEO has been implemented on them.

    Next, you will get to know how different search engines determine the ranks of the websites that they are showing in their search results. Also from Search Engine Watch, there are general trends that search engines observe which help them rank the pages by relevance and their content, so that internet surfers do searches in less time, and they won’t end up with pages full of junk.

According to Search Engine Watch, location and the quality of keywords on a website are very important. Keywords on a website serve as signals that shout out to the web crawling spider, telling it to check them out and include that site in the index. When a search query is made by a web surfer, those search words are matched with the keywords on the search engine index.

    The right keywords are specifically chosen by the webmaster, and the proper way of placing them within content is a prime consideration. More on that will be discussed in chapter 3 of this website.

    Search engines rank websites if important keywords are placed near the top of the page, such as in titles of articles, headings of paragraphs, or even on the navigation menu of that site.

    Frequency of keywords, or how often they are included within the elements or contents of a site, also determines how it can be ranked by the search engine. If you repeat keywords enough times, chances are, it can be crawled and indexed better. There are keyword density rules as specified by guidelines of search engines.

    But take note that filling up a site chock full of keywords is a bad idea. Search engines can mark your site as spam, and not list you at all. More on how you can moderate keywords in your content is found in the next chapters.