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Understanding how Search Engines work

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 basic function of a search engine is to crawl the web, and in order to do this, the search engines make use of highly sophisticated software commonly referred to as a crawler or spider. These crawlers or spiders will follow the millions of links which are present on the web. However, you need to bear in mind that the crawlers are only able to scan for text. In other words they are unable to recognize videos, java script, or in fact anything which is password protected.

Once the crawler or spider has done its work, the gathered information is then indexed. The index is like a large database and is serves as the main information bank for the search engine to use when internet users do a search. Within the index, keywords or keyword phrases are used to assign each web page and website to specific search terms that internet users may use. This is where the websites and web pages are ranked and organized into the order they will appear in the search results.

The next step is the actual search which a user does. Considering that you’ve more than likely used a search engine to find information you’ve been looking for, you’ll be aware of the fact that when you type in your search and press the enter key, you are presented with thousands or even millions of results. This is because the search engines have taken your search criteria and compared it to the data they have in the data base. Of course, each of the search engines has their own ways through which to determine whether a website ranks highly or not. This is achieved by means some of complex algorithms, and once the process is complete, the user is presented with the results.

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.

Ideally, when you go about trying to optimize your website or your web page for the various search engines, you should at least try to establish which algorithms each search engine is using. SEO (Search engine optimization) is nowadays a crucial part of successful Internet marketing and in order to do it effectively, one needs to continuously be adding fresh content to a website. In fact you will need to make various changes to your website or web page periodically in order to maintain a high ranking with regards to your keyword and keyword phrases.

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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