How Search Engines Work

Matt Colyer

Before anyone can start optimizing a web site, you must understand how search engines work.

Search engine optimization is the hardest thing to do for a webmaster because there are so many rules to it and you have to stay up to date with all the new search engine optimization techniques.

Search engines send out what is know as a robot or some people call them spiders to index your web page. They find web pages by links, When a robot finds a link on a web page it will follow it to that page (you can join www.linkexchangeit.com to trade links with other members). Each search engine has it's own robot and each robot acts different, then other robots. Some robots will index all of your web site in day and others will take weeks before they get all of your web pages. A spider is a computer software that moves from web page to web page by links gathering information.

After a robot has indexed your web page it is sent to a database which holds large amount of other web sites. After in the database your web page will be part of the search engine results. The way it indexes your web page and where it places it on its search engine results depends on a number of factors that are on your site.

Search engines will rank your web page based on the information robots receive from indexing. The better you have SEO your site, the higher the ranking.

Matt Colyer is the owner of the Marhen.com Network and is a part-time SEO. He also is a php, CGI and ASP developer.