How Search Engines Work

Search engines enable your customers to find you on the web. But, how do they do that and what is important to them?

The prime objective of any website owner is to be found by the search engines; if it cannot be found, your website is a waste of time and money. The big three search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and Bing) deploy automated software robots (sometimes called spiders) to find you. The spiders jump from hyperlink to hyperlink crawling all over the Internet looking for new content and new websites, while verifying the old content on existing websites.

This page by page crawl by the search engine spiders goes on 24/7 all over the web. This information is stored in a giant database and is indexed, which provides the search engine a roadmap back to the information by keyword, hyperlink, and Meta tag. These databases contain the locations of billions of documents for future reference.

With this database created, the search engine responds to the requests for information made by the users of search engines (I.E. your customers, you, and me). These requests for information are submitted in the form of keywords or phrases and are matched up with the indexed documents. A search engine then provides a listing of the matched results. Depending on the search, the results might yield hundreds or thousands of possible matches.

To make the reading of the search results easier, the search engines ranks the results. Relevance is the key criteria in the ranking and the results are provided in descending order. This ranking is created by algorithms that are constantly monitoring relevance. Relevance can include the age of a document, the number of links to a document, and the keywords in the document. All this is done in fractions of a second.

To please the search engine gods, be sure to offer the following on your website:

• Write unique content frequently (not cut and paste).
• Make sure that your content is rich with keywords but don’t over do it.
• Make sure your meta tags and title tags are unique for each page.
• Encourage inbound links from other influential websites.

If you do these simple things, your site will be in the top 2% of the web!

John Bradley Jackson
Entrepreneur, Professor, Author
Deja New Marketing
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