How Do Search Engines Work

I have been raving on about seo over the last few posts. I decided to do some research to find out how the search engines actually work. What follows is what I found out.

The search engines bring your website to the notice of the potential customers whey the customer initiates a search.

A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spiders visit a web site, read the content, read the Meta tags and also follows any links. Search engines 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.

The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well.

The spider will 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.

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 its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index it has created. It is not actually searching the web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the index.

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. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages on the web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can determine what a page is about and if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

Hope you found this interesting and useful.

Until the next post.

Hugs
Sharon