Un-mythify Search Engines

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective world. It is vital to understand how search engines actually work and how they present information to a search.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spiders will index your entire site or may be partially. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site's Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages! A reminder about links or the hazardous ‘link farm’, try not to have external links more than 30 links.

Then, we talk about content weight versus link count. Another benefit of this is that with a content rich site you can add hundreds of links quite legitimately and really add some value both to your rankings and your users. With a content-poor site it is difficult, you have to add linkpages or create a link directory or web directory. Or slightly to extreme end of non-organic is bid directory; where categories are categorized highly promoted bidding web directory where quality sites are listed with the top 10 listings being shown on the homepage. A five-page site will need to add 10 or 12 good link pages to compete and even then with algorithm changes, this may not be prudent.

Having a site with 400 pages means you can easily add 3 links per page, so you have 1200 link options straight away. Always bear in mind when writing content that relevant links will not only boost your search engine rankings, but you will also add a service to your visitors.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Optimization to stand out in search engine or Search Engine Optimization (SEO), seo-ing is a race rather than a process of choosing the most appropriate targeted keyword phrases related to your site and ensuring that this ranks your site highly in search engines so that when someone searches for specific phrases it returns your site on tops. It basically involves fine tuning the content of your site along with the HTML and Meta tags and also involves appropriate link building process. The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL and Ask Jeeves.

Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results. A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually. Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #200 in another search engine. New sites need not be "submitted" to search engines to be listed. A simple link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents. The next step in optimizing is that you must put each of your keywords into the text of your web page at least 4 times! This is one area where your web page sinks or swims in the search engine 'spidering' process.