Easiest Website Builder ever! · Build your own toolbar · Free Talking Character · Email Marketing
powered by
bravenet.com
|
|
How Search Engines Work
By Lawrence Andrews
Most search engines have three parts: a crawler, an index, and a
search interface. Let's look at each part individually, to get a
better understanding of them. Each part has its own role to play
in the process, with all the gimwsp parts working together to make
searches possible.
The Crawler.
Also known as a 'spider' or 'bot', this part of the search engine
wanders the web, following links and picking up information for
its database. Crawlers do most of their work at times of the day
when search engines are less busy, but they typically visit
frequently updated pages more often. This is something to keep in
mind when you're working on your pages. As you may want to
perform updates locally and update them when they have been
finished rather than updating bits and pieces and hoping that the
search engine runs into the correct version.
Also, crawlers ignore some things: your site's code, for example.
Your site's title and text - your 'content' - is the most
important thing to a crawler. The fastest way to raise your
site’s search engine ranking for specific key words is to
implement them into your title and your content.
The Index.
Once the crawler has collected all that text, it is then stored
and indexed. This allows people searching for keywords and
phrases to get results relating to what they were searching for -
their search results. Most sites will incorporate rating systems
such as msn Page Ranks or Alexa rankings in positioning your
site. These ratings are used to attempt to ensure that sites that
are important receive more traffic than unimportant sites.
To see this in action, go to a search engine and type in a word.
You'll see some text on the page saying something like
"results 1-10 of 345,000". This means that the search
engine's index contains 345,000 pages it believes are related to
the word you typed. If you wanted to, you could look through all
these pages to find the information you're looking for.
In order to understand rating systems more thoroughly consider
your own site. When you place links on your site you generally
due so in order to increase your users understanding of the
content of your site. If every site in a particular field links
to a particular site, this site is probably very important to
that field and should, therefore, be listed highly in the lists
of search engine results. Thus the basic ideology of msn Page
Ranks.
Consider again, a site that receives a great deal of traffic. If
a site is receiving loads and loads of traffic, it probably has
some information or service that is very important to its users.
Alexa ratings attempt to estimate the amount of traffic that a
particular site gets and compare it to the amount of traffic that
other sites get. The closer that a site is to the most trafficked
site on the internet, the more likely it is to have important
content if it is relevant to the search query.
The Interface.
Search engines provide a public interface for users who want to
find information on the web. They can type the word or phrase
they're searching for, and the interface will run an algorithm to
find the pages relevant to their search and display them.
These algorithms are an important part of the SEO (search engine
optimization) business, and the search engines are constantly
changing them. You'll notice when the algorithms change, as the
rankings of your website will change with them.
No two search engines are the same. They all work differently,
with their own unique features, and they will all respond to your
website in their own way. You should familiarize yourself with
the most popular search engines, to better understand how each of
them works.
The most popular search engines today include msn, Yahoo,
AltaVista, AllTheWeb, MSN, and Ask Jeeves. There are many other
search engines available, though, and you shouldn't ignore them
altogether.
When you submit your website to the search engines, there's no
way of knowing when they might add it to their indexes. Since
each search engine has its own crawling and indexing methods, you
can't be sure how long it might take. In some cases, you might
see results within a week, but don't count on it - it may take
several weeks or even months before you see anything.
It's not easy to get a high ranking unless you spend some time on
it, and learn the proper methods. When you take the time and do
some research, you'll find that it's not as confusing as you
first thought. Learning the basics will enhance your experience
more than you would have thought possible.
About The Author:
Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer,
consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label
Content and Software site at http://www.lmamedia.com for more
information about
SEO and PRL.
You may use this article freely on your website as long as this
resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this
article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/
online casino btdino
bravenet.com