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.