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.

Basically there are two types of search engines. The first one is robots which are called crawlers or spiders. Search Engines use these spiders or crawlers to index websites. As soon as you submit your website pages to a search engine by implementing their necessary submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program specifically run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read 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 too. Some spiders will simply index a specific number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will frequently come back to the sites to test out for any information that has changed. The rate of recurrence with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is nearly 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 possibly index up to a million pages a day.

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 determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.