Learning how search engines work can help
you market your site.
The common misconception is that
search engines crawl the web when a user enters a
search query. This is not true. Search engines
use automated programmes (spiders or bots) to constantly
crawl the internet and index websites that they find
according to keywords that the website uses. These
programmes return to a site and index any changes that may have
occurred. These can affect where a website places for search
results.
A search engine has four
components, such as spiders, index, relevancy
algorithms and search results. Search engines
send out spiders (or bots) to crawl as many web pages as
possible. These are then read, collected and indexed to give you the
best results for your search criteria. The search engine
responds to a search query by looking at its own index
(not the internet) and returns relevant results for the
query.
Search engines typically want
to return relevant and organic results, thus they
ignore banners and other rich media (like flash) in the search.
PageRank is assigned to the indexed pages and the most
relevant results (the highest ranking) get placed at the
top of the page.
All search engines rank
relevancy in a different way, using different criteria to determine
relevancy. A good idea is to research as many of the criteria as you
can and attempt to make your website work on all the major
search engines. Another option is to optimise for one
search engine, usually the most popular search engine,
and see that it works on other search engines as well.
In
terms of SEM (Search Engine Marketing), you need to
optimise your website in order to make it work with most of a search
engine’s criteria for relevancy. The three largest search engines,
Google, Bing and Yahoo!, have guidelines and policies in place that
you can read in order to make sure that your website performs well.
The other way to optimise your website is to hire the
services of an SEO company, but make sure that they use
white-hat SEO techniques so that you don’t get punished by
search engines for bad SEO practices.