How search engines work
Have you ever wondered how search engines work and how your web site get ranked? Search engine companies guard their secrets, but the basic principal is well known and easy to understand.
There are several things that happen before a web site is presented to you among search engines results, and in this article I will explain the process in it's simplest form.
The process in a nutshell
You've probably heard the term 'spider' used in relation to search engines. A spider is simply a small program that 'crawls' the web in search of content, hence it's arachnid namesake.
The spider will examine a web site looking for links and content which it sends back to the search engine server for indexing.
A search engine index is basically a catalogue, except the order of the items are not arranged in a typical alpha numeric fashion. Instead web pages are ranked by several criteria, some of which are the relevance of the content, the link popularity of the site, how the content compares to other web sites, and more.
How are web sites optimised for search?
The very core of good search engine optimisation starts with a properly built web site. Designers utilise many methods to get web sites to realise their fullest search engine potential, including the use of semantic mark-up, using modern web design practices (using CSS to control presentation), and making sure the web site 100% validates to W3C standards.
With a web site properly constructed and relevant content added, a search engine can index the content accurately, which means better results can be expected from an internet search.
What is relevant content?
Search engines, Google in particular are very good at seeing when a web site has content that reads normally and relates to the business or topic, or when a web site has been obviously spammed with keywords. The latter is considered extremely bad practice and search engines will penalise it.
In other words the content needs to read naturally, and not be deliberately filled (spammed) with overly used keywords.
As an example, the title of one web page might be "Our web site design services" which is perfectly fine.
An extremely bad example could be "We do cheap web site design, affordable web sites, web site discounts, custom web sites and cheap hosting and design". I'm sure you'll agree that no human could read a site written in that way without going insane.
Sadly this bad example is still practiced by some web companies, usually by a guy who keeps a copy of 'Marketing for the web 1990 edition' in plain sight.
Avoiding stagnation
A few years ago Google (let's face it, the only significant search engine) made it known they will penalise for stagnation. This means that if the spider keeps coming back to your site and finds that nothing has changed, your site will begin to slide further down the ladder.
What this really means is that web sites that are updated regularly will be given search result priority over the stagnant ones.
The solution? Keep your content updated and fresh. Updating a page or two every month is usually enough to warrant a significant change.
Do that and you will be doing yourself a huge service.