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Indianapolis SEO – How search engines work
Posted in: Blog, Tech Tips by admin on June 11, 2010
If you have a website, you know how important it is for people to be able to find you in the major search engines. You also probably know that to get your site on page one of a search engine like Google, you need to “optimize your website,” also known as search engine optimization or SEO. But do you know how a search engine actually goes about the task of deciding where to list your page? Knowing the basics of how a search engine works is a good first step to understanding how to optimize your web pages.
Search engines perform three basic tasks. First, they go out and find web pages. Second, they keep an index of the pages they find. Third, they rank those pages for a particular keyword and allow users to search for pages containing those words.
So how does a search engine find a web page? There are no humans involved in this task. It is done with the use of software robots called “spiders” that “crawl” the web (get it?) The spider will typically start at a heavily used site, crawl through all the pages on the site and follow all the links from that site to other sites. As it crawls pages, it builds lists of words found on those pages, notes on where the words are found, and indexes those lists.
Search engines index billions of pages annually, so the next step is to determine what order to display those pages when someone types in a particular search term. It does that through the use of complex algorithms, or sorting techniques, based on what it finds on a page. For example, if a spider reads the words “real estate,” “Indiana,” and “commercial,” it knows that this is a page about commercial real estate in Indiana and would likely show this as a result when a user types those words into a computer.
Note the use of the word “likely”. It’s not a given that your page will show up for a particular word or phrase, and it is less of a given that it will show up on page one. When you’re competing with thousands or even millions of other pages for a particular word, it helps to know how to structure your page to give it the best chance of it being listed highly in the results when a user searches on those words. This is where search engine optimization comes in.
Now that you know how search engines work, stay tuned for future Tech Tips on how to optimize your pages.
If you need help optimizing your web pages or any other internet work, contact:
Valerie Baten
Online Architecture
317-253-2900 x110
