Search Engine Optimization

How Does a Search Engine Work?

Before we can talk about search engine optimization you need to know
and understand the very basics of how a search engine works. While
the process is very mathematical and way more complex than most
people care to know about, I will try and give you a very simple
explanation.


A search engine, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc… sends a “spider”
to a new website. This spider is simply a bit of code, or a program if
you will, which “crawls” the website. Crawling the website is simply a
matter of copying the pages and then downloading a copy of them to
the search engine’s web server.


Once the site has been crawled by the spider, the search engine then
indexes the information from the pages it now has copies of. The
indexing is all about keywords, tags, and what the site itself is all
about.


When you go to www.google.com and put in a keyword to search for,
your “search results” page is based in the indexed pages from this
process.

So, a search engine basically sends a spider to your pages, crawls
them, copies them down to their own server, indexes the information
on them, and then uses their index when someone does a search. It’s
not really that simplistic of a process, but as far as what most of us
need to know that is basically what happens.