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It is the search engines
that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective
customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines
actually work and how they present information to the customer
initiating a search.
There are basically two types of
search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.
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 spider
will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that
is run by the search engine system. The spider visits a web site, reads
the content on the actual site, the site's
Meta
tags and also follow the links that the site connects.
The
spider then returns all that information back to a central
depository, where the data is indexed. 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!
The spider will
periodically return to the sites to check for any information that
has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by
the moderators of the search engine.
A spider is almost like a
book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and
the links and references for all the websites it finds during its
search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.
Example:
Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.
When you ask a search
engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the
index which it has created and not actually searching the Web.
Different search engines produce different rankings because not
every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the
indices.
One of the things that a
search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of
keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword
stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the
way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages
link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is
about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the
keywords on the original page.
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