Search engines bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. When a topic is typed for search, almost instantly, search engines will sift through the millions of indexed pages and present you with ones that match your topic. The searched matches are also ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Prospective customer will probably only look at the first 2-3 listings in the search results therefore making rankings very important.

Furthermore, most searchers will use only a few search engines. Specifically the ones that do the best job in presenting the most relative search results. So in the end it all depends on which search engines the customers use and how they rank your site.

Selecting the right keywords to rank for will bring your site the right kind of visitors. It is the Keywords that play an important role than any expensive online or offline advertising of your website.

When someone wants to find a website for information or to buy a product or service, they find their site in one of the following ways:

The first option is they find their site through a search engine. This can happen when someone searches for the name of the site or when searching for the name of a product or service.

Secondly they find their site by clicking on a link from another website or page that relates to the topic in which they are interested.

Occasionally, they find a site by hearing about it from a friend or reading in an article.

The most popular way to find a site, by search engine, represents more than 90% of online users. In other words, only 10% of the people looking for a website will use methods other than search engines.

All search engines employ different ranking algorithms. These algorithms might vary substantially from search engine to search engine however, the thing every search engine checks is the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Algorithms also rank web pages based on how many links or in other words, votes of confidence they have from other pages.

Optimization of your site can really give you the rankings and traffic that will help your business grow. When performed by a qualified, experienced search engine optimization consultant, this kind of optimization can and will produce results.

Search engines connect your site to visitors and to prospective customers. Understanding how a search engine works and how it presents information to the customers can give you an advantage when aiming to grow your business and increase your customer base.

Search engines like Google rely on complex algorithms to rank web sites. How well a site satisfies the variables of these algorithms is what determines how well that site will be ranked in the result pages.

Google, just like the other major search engines use what are referred to as spiders and robots to scan and index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page the search engine spider will automatically visit and eventually include it in its index. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, reads the content on the actual site and the site’s title tags. In addition, these spiders or robots will follow the links you site contains. All the information it gathers is returned 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.

These spiders will periodically return to sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by many factors including 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 which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithms to search through the indices. That’s why when you search for a term in Google and Yahoo for example, it is very likely you will get completely different results.

Once the spiders have visited your site and the information has been gathered it will be analyzed to determine where your site should be positioned in search engine result pages.

There are many factors that determine how a site will be positioned. These factors depend on variables that have to do with your web design as well as exogenous factors such as links.

For example, one of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page. Then the algorithms analyze 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.

Spiders crawl the web constantly. That doesn’t mean that your site will be visited by these spiders. In order to achieve a dynamic search engine presence you will need to create a website that attracts these spiders and that it reminds the search engine of its existence. To do so you will need to develop and search engine optimization strategy that includes both on page as well as off page approaches.