Home » Articles » Search engine optimization |
|
Search engines and how they work By Jakob Jelling As a webmaster working on optimizing your website or as a person just trying to learn and understand how the optimization process works, the most important thing you should know is how do search engines work. If you know that, you can easily understand and utilize many of the optimization techniques that are currently available to you. There are two main search engine types which use different methods to rank the websites that they review. The first type includes human-powered directories where people act as editors and reviewers of the websites submitted for listing. These people will review the description that you submitted or provide a description for your website. Quite often these reviewers come from an online community of volunteer editors. The second type of search engines includes the engines that use an automatic process of ranking websites using a program that is sometimes called a “spider” or a “crawler”. This program will search through the websites on the web and will review various elements of the web pages. An appropriate rank will be given to the website based on the algorithm that is implemented. With the automated process the spider program goes to various web pages, reads thought them and follows the included links. This spider program will also check for any changes on a regular basis. All the information found by the spider program is stored in the searchable index. When a search engine visitor starts a search on some keyword, the search engine software will search through the index, rank the results based on relevancy and display the results to the visitor in the order of ranking. The way the search engine ranks the results of the search depends on the algorithms that are implemented in the software. But there are many common characteristics that the majority of search engines look for in web pages. First of all, the search engine will look at the keywords’ location in the content of the web page and keywords density. Very close attention is paid to the title tag and meta description tags. The web pages with keywords appearing close to the beginning of the page will get higher ranking. The search engine software will also try to determent the quality of the content and try to disregard the web pages that contain no meaningful content or web pages that are using spamming techniques to increase the ranking Another characteristic that the search engine software will look at is the analysis of the way different pages link to one another. The better your links are, the more important your web page will be considered by the search engine. Here both the internal link structure and links to and from other websites are important. The software will also try to determine if any simulated or fake links are present.
|
|