I’ve talked about some ways to increase your visibility on search engines, how to optimize your site and some linking strategies, today I’m going to take a step back and go over the basics of how a search engine works. Knowing how the search engines work gives you a good base to move forward and make them work for you and your site.
Search engines have three main parts, the spider, the index and the query. The spider is what the search engine sends out to know what is on the web, and for your purposes, what is on your site. Spiders crawl the web, looking for text, links and web site addresses. They don’t particularly like images, flash or frames. They like text, html and links.
The text gets spidered and digested. This is where the search engines are going to find out what is on your site, what keywords they are going to index you under and more. The spiders also follow the links on your page, and more importantly, links to your site from other pages. Links are like a popularity contest, each link is a vote for your site. Good, high quality links give you strong votes for your site, improving search engine visibility. Links also send the spiders to the site linked to. Many links will ensure that the spiders find and crawl your site more often.
Once the spiders do their job, it is time for the indexing portion of the search engine to go to work. The index function takes the information the spider finds and runs it through an formula that tells the search engine how to index your site. This is important, as the manner your site gets indexed has a direct relationship to how your site will be found in the search engines.
Good content, with text and keywords is important to getting your site indexed properly. You don’t want to stuff your page with keywords so it makes no sense to readers, make sure the content is for the end user, not the search engine, but you do want to be mindful of how you want your site to be found, and include keyword phrases in your content that will accomplish this goal.
The final part to the search engine puzzle is the query. This is the search box that users will type in a search to hopefully find you on the internet. This is where keywords come into play. Great content and a highly trusted site don’t do much for you if users are not looking for what you are offering. You want to do your research on what people are typing into these query’s so that you can take advantage of that traffic.
If you sell red widgets, find out what kind of red widgets people are searching for so you can take advantage of that traffic. Maybe people search for red widgets, small red widgets and disposable red widgets, but not waterproof red widgets. If you are trying to sell waterproof red widgets, that’s fine, but you should target your waterproof red widget pages to show up for the popular searches of small and disposable red widgets. You can go here for a great Keyword Tool for your research. The basic tool is free to use, but they have many many upgrades well worth the money that you may want to look into as well.
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