Introduction to search engines
Everyone uses search engines to find information, and when the online search engines work for you, it can be a factor in making or breaking your website. The question is, how to get them to help your website so that potential visitors can find you. Our overview provides some insight into what search engines are, how they work, and how they rank your site in their results pages.
Search engines are primarily web-based software that crawl, or spider, the internet, looking for information and indexing the pages it finds so that it can return relevant pages and information when its users perform a search. For your website to be found in a search, the search engine first must know that your website exists, then spider its content to understand what your pages are about, then store that information within its index for future use.
Popular search engines include Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and Bing by Microsoft, however there are hundreds more that are not as well known. Although they basically do the same thing, their programming is written slightly differently, and the factors and algorhythms they use to rank websites may return different search results for the same types of searches. Search engines have also been programmed to search for certain types of media, for example images, videos, news, etc., to help refine search results for their users.
There are basically 2 ways to get the search engines aware of your new website. One method is to submit your site information to the different search engines, then let them crawl it, however this method usually takes much longer to get any results, and many experienced webmasters seldom do this anymore. The second method, which is much faster, is to have other websites link to your website so that during the spidering process, the search engine finds the links to your site and will go to it to begin crawling it. Once a spider crawls a website, it isn't finished; it will return many times looking for new information, and will continually look for new links as well. For this reason, an inbound link to your site will get the search engines crawling your site much sooner.
Spiders look for certain types of information within the pages it scans. It will read the pages title and meta description and keyword area to get an initial idea of what the page is related to. As it goes through the rest of the page, it will look for keywords related to the content of the page. It also looks for other elements, like bold text, paragraph headings ( also called "h" tags), which indicate important words and terms in the content, and alternate text for images displayed in the page. These elements are called onsite SEO which we cover more in depth in our SEO section. One of the most important factors, however, is useful user content, meaning that the more text there is on the page that is actually beneficial to humans, the better. If pages are stuffed with keywords and content that isn't useful, search engines are smart enough to figure it out and can actually penalize your site by giving it low search rankings, or not putting it into search results at all. This is why the phrase "Content is king" is popular, and accurate.
Once the crawlers have scanned a webpage, it factors in many of these elements and stores information about the pages in its index. When a user does a web search, the engine doesn't have to literally start going all over the web to find pages for its search results, but instead refers to this index so that it can quickly return results consisting of pages it has already found and analized. This system helps return search results quickly and accurately. When the results are listed, the search engines ranking system determines in which order to list the results that it feels are relevant to the users search, and may not list a website at all if it feels it is not relevant or useful.