SEO Tips, Discover How Search Engines Really Work

SEO or search engine optimization has become one of the most powerful weapons to increase the site traffic. As we should aware that without traffic means no sales. So what is search engine and how does it really work? Search Engines are special sites on the Web that are designed to help people find information stored on other sites. There are differences in the ways various Search Engines work, but they all perform three basic tasks and act the main sources of information and that is:

1. They search the Internet by selecting or choosing pieces of the information on the Internet based on important words which is also known as keywords.
2. The search engine they keep an index of the words they find, and where they find them.
3. They allow users to look for words or combination of words found in that index which is also known as keyword phrase.

Each search engine has their own unique way of performing but it served for the same purpose. Early Search Engines held an index of a few hundred thousand pages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousand inquiries each day. But not in today trend where a top Search Engine will index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens of millions of queries per day.

Before a Search Engine can tell you where a file or document is, it must be found. To find information on the hundreds of millions of Web pages that exist, a Search Engine employs special software robots, called spiders, to build lists of the words found on Web sites.

When a spider is building its lists, the process is called web crawling where the robots will crawl into pages that are contents rich and that has necessary elements that allow search engine to get in and grab the information.

Quality of the information depends on how rich the contents are and how well the contents are written. In order to build and maintain a useful list of words, a Search Engine's spiders have to look at a lot of pages. How does any spider start its travels over the Web? The usual starting points are lists of heavily used servers and very popular pages. So, the more popular your site is the better ranking or position you will get.

The spider will begin with a popular site, indexing the words on its pages and following every link found within the site. In this way, the spide system quickly begins to travel, spreading out across the most widely used portions of the Web.

Search engines act as a information storage. What they will do is, once the spiders have completed the task of finding information on Web pages, the Search Engine must store the information in a way that makes it useful. There are two major mechanisms involved in making the gathered data reachable to users and that is:

1. The information stored with the data.
2. The method by which the information is indexed.

In other words, a Search Engine could just store the word and the URL where it was found which I mentioned earlier act as a storage. In reality, this would make for an engine of limited use, since there would be no way of telling whether the word was used in an important or a trivial way on the page, whether the word was used once or many times or whether the page contained links to other pages containing the word.

In other words, there would be no way of building the ranking list that tries to present the most useful pages at the top of the list of search results.

The truth is, to make for more useful results, most Search Engines store more than just the word and URL. There are some other data, components or elements are also being monitored to provide more meaningful results. A Search Engine might store the number of times that the word appears on a page. The engine might allocate a weight to each entry, with increasing values assigned to words as they appear near the top of the document, in sub-headings, in links, in the META tags or in the title of the page. So, you will need to understand this so that your website pages are fully optimized for the search engines.

Different sites have different way of analyzing and information gathered. Each commercial Search Engine has a different formula for assigning weight to the words in its index. This is one of the reasons that a search for the same word on different Search Engines will produce different lists, with the pages presented in different orders. Meaning even though others might be using the same sets of keywords in their site, they might not get the same results as you are.

So, what is the purpose of index actually? An index has a single purpose and that is it allows information to be found as quickly as possible. There are quite a few ways for an index to be built, but one of the most effective ways is to build a hash table. In hashing, a formula is applied to attach a numerical value to each word.

The formula is designed to evenly distribute the entries across a predetermined number of divisions. This numerical distribution is different from the distribution of words across the alphabet, and that is the key to a hash table's effectiveness.

How does it work?

When a person requests a search on a keyword or phrase, the Search Engine software searches the index for relevant information. The software then provides a report back to the searcher with the most relevant web pages listed first.

Hopefully, by reading this SEO tips article you managed to get some useful information that will help you in your website SEO optimization. By understanding all these you will be able to perform proper search engine marketing and site promotion that will surely bring you results to your business.

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Comments

Wed, 4 Mar 2009 at 2:34 PM, by justin brooke
Good read. Well, gone are the days when you only need a website to get all set up. Now, you need SEO tactics to succeed online

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