The Basics To Understand Search Engines

Most search engines use spider robots to crawl the web in search of hyperlinks to perform their indexing. These robots are programs that automatically move from page to page analysing their content to evaluate if it is worth being included in their listing. If it is, they will grade them under a topic category. Although 'how' exactly the search engines accomplish this task still remains a secret, SEO experts seem to agree on certain parameters that certainly help to get your webpage effectively indexed and ranked in Google.

First and foremost, keeping your website optimised is the first step in the SEO process of getting found and listed by search engines. In order to do this, you must understand the importance of a careful selection of keywords for your website. Keywords are words or phrases that accurately describe the content of your documents. Choose only a keyword (or keyword phrase) per page and use it strategically thoroughout the content because 'there' is where the robots will go to find it in order to get it indexed. The more frequent a word or phrase appears in a page the more weight is given. Your selected keyword should be used in the title of your article, in the first paragraph, in the ALT attribute of the images you use, in the description, in the keyword section and through your document with a frequency of 1/100 words.

Once that you have created a SEO friendly website, the next step would be to submit it to the search engines so that they can include your URL in their list and therefore, be subsequently visited by their spider robots. They will make regular visits to the existing websites in their list to verify they still exist. If they do, they will maintain their category/position or change it if the content has been updated. If they don´t, they are automatically removed. Bear in mind that the process of submission may take several weeks to be completed and with no guarantee that your website will be listed. You shouldn´t worry about this though because search engines have other criteria to create their listings.

Having external links pointing to your website is another important parameter that search engines consider to rank web pages. However, it is not the quantity of the links what will make your page be ranked high but the relevancy and the quality.

Search engines also consider important how the anchor text of your link is built. Thus, you need to make sure that the links you create have a common theme and are tightly topic-related to the keywords of the page you are pointing to.

Author: Sheila Muir / Posted: 27-05-2011