The big search engines today are mainly responsible for delivering visitors and customers to the millions of web pages on the internet. Once search engines are understood by webmasters, they can use their new knowledge in order to gain a higher website ranking within search results.

Ever Wonder How Search Engines Work?

Search engines use web crawlers also known as spiders to collect information on web pages for indexing in search results. Spiders or web crawlers are basically software scripts that fetch information from the world wide web following all the links it finds. When the spider finds a website it reads the meta tags and the main content on the page. As links are found on web pages the spider will also follow those links and index that web page also. Information that the spiders collect every day gets put into a huge index for the search engine. One fact many people overlook is that search engines index individual web pages, not entire websites. A few search engines will only index up to 500 web pages for any given domain or website, so you may want to keep that in mind and not build more than 500 pages.

Search engine spiders return to already indexed pages on a frequency set by the search engine administrators in order to check for any changes or updates it may find on a web page. Spiders may index up to one million pages per day. A search engine index is like a large book containing all of the content and links that it finds and organizes it like a table of contents. that it finds during a crawl session.

Example popular search engines of today: Google, Yahoo and Bing (MSN)

When someone enters a search term into a search engine, the search engine actually searches through its own index to produce the search results for that particular search term. Web pages may appear in different positions or ranks in different search engines due to the fact that each engine utilizes different algorithm’s for producing results from its index.

The inner workings of the search engine algorithm’s are usually kept a secret from public knowledge. Basically, they scan for location and frequency of keywords on a page. This is also referred to as keyword density which brings up an important point, using a keyword too much on a single web page is considered spam by some search engines and they will punish your page by removing it from their index. Algorithm’s also analyze all the links on a website and the anchor text used for the link. If web pages link to other pages with relevant content, this basically increases the power of the web pages, thereby increasing the page rank in the search engines. This should give you at least a fundamental understanding of how search engines work.

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