How do search engines work?
Before you decide how you'd like to market your web site, it's important that you understand at least a little about how the search engines work ...
Most people use an internet search site such as Google, Altavista, MSN, Lycos, Ask Jeeves etc on a regular, if not daily basis. Getting yourself properly listed by them is key to the success of your site, however it can take time.
The way in which search engines work is constantly changed in order to improve the quality of search results that their users get – because of this, “search engine optimisation” is an entire subject in itself which swallows up the lives of many people in an attempt to discover the holy grail – the formula to a perfect listing.
Most search engines work in similar ways – Google is generally regarded as being the most important one to get listed on. We’ll concentrate our efforts on that, the idea being that if the techniques used manage to get you listed on Google, the other engines will find you easily anyway.
Google uses “spiders” or “robots” which are automated systems that visit every site on the web (or at least ones that they know about) and index (read and remember) the content from each of those sites. This info is reported “back to base” and is compiled on a regular basis into a complete index of the internet. Unless you’ve already carried out some marketing, it’s unlikely that Google will even be aware of your site – it can’t visit a site that it doesn’t know exists.
A couple of the major search engines allow you to “submit” your site – you just fill in a simple form telling them about your site. They get thousands of submissions every day, so your site will be in a list of “sites that our spiders should really go and have a look at one-day, but really there’s more interesting places to be going until then” – this can take time (anything from a few weeks to a few months) – but, it’s a start. A lot of the search engines have started charging for “fast-track” submissions – our personal view on this is that it’s a waste of money … the techniques later on in this guide work much better than submissions do and cost much less. You also see ads occasionally for companies who will submit you to 300 search engines for just £x – can you name 300 search engines? The vast majority of internet users use the big name search engines (many of whom share databases), so some of these schemes seem a little dubious.
When a Google spider encounters a link on a site that it is visiting, it follows that link ... The more times it stumbles across your site, the more important it considers your site to be.
Therefore, the more websites that have links to your site on them the better. Well at least that’s partially true … the more relevant websites that have links to your site on them the better. A relevant site is one that targets similar visitors to your own (eg: if you sell car parts, anything to do with motoring would be relevant whereas perfume wouldn’t be considered to be even slightly relevant). Google ranks sites on the basis of relevancy to improve the accuracy of searches.
More info available at
www.vengavenga.com
How Do Search Engines Work?
Linear Mode
December 2008
