At the end of the day when you really look at the num­bers, it’s the major search engines organic search results that will  finally bring you the qual­ity and directed inter­net vis­i­bil­ity that your small busi­ness is look­ing for.

This is why it makes sense to have at the very least, a mod­er­ate under­stand­ing of how these major search engines actu­ally do their jobs.

When you start learn­ing about search engines, there are a few terms you need to come to grasps with.

• Spiders
• Crawl
• Index
• Links
• Meta Tags

Search Engines use spi­ders to index web­sites hosted all over the inter­net. When your web­site is suc­cess­fully sub­mit­ted to a search engine, the search engine’s spi­der will receive a request to then crawl and index your entire site. A ‘spi­der’ is an auto­mated pro­gram that is run by the search engine and is specif­i­cally designed to index your web site using a com­pli­cated algo­rithm. The spi­der per­forms a few tasks when it vis­its your site, it reads the con­tent, meta tags, and it fol­lows the links that the site con­nects with. The spi­der then returns all of this infor­ma­tion back to a ‘cen­tral data­base or direc­tory’, where it is then indexed based on the spi­ders findings.

After your site is ini­tially indexed by the search engine,  its spi­der will peri­od­i­cally return to the site and check for any infor­ma­tion that has changed. The fre­quency with which this hap­pens is deter­mined by a few things, one of them is sim­ply the num­ber of rel­e­vant con­tent web­sites that link back to your site for the spi­ders to follow.

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 indexes.

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.

All of this and more comes into play when mak­ing attempt to rank your web­site in the major search engine’s organic search results.

- Travis Gutierrez