The only way you’ll ever understand how to use a search engine effectively, is by first making a point of understanding how they work. In other words, you need to get a grip on the fundamental concepts of the various search engines before you’ll be able to use them to your advantage. As you no doubt already know, search engines can be immensely confusing, but providing you’re willing to delve a little deeper in order to get a basic understanding, you’ll soon begin to realize just how they work.

As you no doubt already know, search engines are used to index websites and web pages. In other words, search engines regularly scan the Internet for content and then index websites and web pages accordingly. This is why a person can enter certain criteria into the search box, and once they hit the enter key, they are supplied with hundreds of thousands of results.

The first step in how a search engine operates and gathers information is crawling the web. To do this the search engine uses software called a crawler or spider. The crawler or spider will follow links throughout the web to scan content. They are usually only able to scan text based content, so java script, videos and anything password protected will not be recognized and therefore will not be used by the crawler or spider.

Once the spider has completed the scanning process and gathered all the necessary information, it is then able to index it. Generally speaking, the index is a massive data base which serves as an information bank for the search engines. When a computer user types in a search, the search engines will search this database. In order to supply results which are relevant to a search, the information which is stored in the data bank is assigned to various key words and keyword phrases. This is of course also where the millions of web sites are ranked and organized so that they can be displayed in search results.

The next thing that happens is the search by an internet user. You have probably used a search engine to find information, so you know that you type a term into the search engine, press enter and you get pages of results. The search engine will take the term you enter, compare it to the database and process the search request. Each search engine has its own way to process and figure which websites and web pages match your search term. These are called algorithms. Once the search engine has processed the request the results are returned to you and you get the pages of relevant websites and web pages.

Of course all search engines are different due to the fact that they all use different algorithms, and this is why you would be presented with different results from the different search engines even if you typed in the exact same search criteria. This is largely because the different algorithms place emphasis on different factors such as links, meta tags, and keyword density. The results you get will depend largely on which factors are considered to be more important by each of the search engines. Another thing to bear in mind is that the search engines change their algorithms frequently which of course make things even more complicated than they already are.

When you are optimizing your website or web page for the search engines, it helps to know what algorithms the search engine uses. Search Engine Optimization or SEO, is a major part of internet marketing. It involves adding content, changing website setup and doing any tweaks needed to help get your website or web page ranked high on the search engines for your chosen keyword or keyword phrase.

Having an understanding of how search engines operate, and the methods they use for ranking websites is a huge advantage with regards to search engine optimization. However, because these factors are continuously changing, your SEO efforts will need to be ongoing if you want your site to remain at the top of the page.

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