How search engines work: a brief description

Search engines are an essential fact of life on the Internet. Yet all too often search engine optimization is shrouded in technical mumbo jumbo. Once you understand how search engines work it should be clear that our customer-centered approach makes sense. 

Know the rules!

Each search engine is governed by its own distinct rules. They are constantly updated to detect “illegal” tricks and unethical search engine practices and they may make you pay by “sandboxing” your site if you are caught. Improper search engine optimization can shut down an on line business fast.

Know the market!

Searchers make their search engine choices (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.) based on their particular perceptions of those brands. Furthermore, they conduct their searches based on marketing patterns according to their demographic category such as age, gender and income group.

Search engine success requires both following the rules governing all major search engines as well as knowledge of which search engines your customers use and how they search.

Keywords and phrases

Search engines index terms and phrases that appear to it to have value. Since they use computer programs to make these determinations they use parameters established by their programmers to make their evaluation.

Search engine spiders are crawling the Internet. Make sure they crawl all over your web site.

Search engines use automated computer programs often called spiders, bots or crawlers to search the web and analyze the content of web sites. They harvest keywords from the text and other data and store them in the search engine's data base.

When your customer enters a keyword or phrase the search engine checks that phrase against the information in its database. The search engine responds with what it believes to be the most relevant pages first and ranks less relevant pages in descending order. Hopefully your web site is on or close to the top.

Page ranking

Search engines are designed to deliver a high level of value to searchers while protecting search engine ranking secrets from their competitors and making it difficult for web site operators or unethical search engine optimization firms to fake out the system.

Ranking priority is given to:

• the relevance of key words requested by the searcher
• link popularity (the number and importance of incoming links to a web page)
• any penalties for fraudulent or suspicious search engine optimization practices.

Organic or natural search vs. paid search

Organic or natural search are those results that show up using the search engine’s built in search program. It is offered free of charge to the general public.

The major search engines offer web site owners opportunities to pay fees, usually based on clicks to the site to have their web site show up prominently in search engine results. They are often hard to distinguish from natural search results.

Effectively optimized web sites are less dependent or completely independent of paid search advertising.

To find out how we can help you lower your pay per click costs call us or fill out the form on our web site.