Search engines help you find pages of information on your relevant topic stored on other websites. These Internet searches are based on keywords. Search engines also keep an indexed database of all the keywords they discover, and where they have found them, and they allow you to look for your keywords found on their indexed database. Search engines are infinitely useful, because they sort through the billions of pages of information on the world wide web to bring you the ones with the specific information you need right to your computer quickly and easily.

The first thing a search engine has to do in order to let you know where the information you want is located is to find that information itself. It does this by using web robots known as spiders to search many pages of content, and they index the content they find into organized lists of information. The web robot usually begins looking at popular servers and pages, and then they spread out to every link found on a website, indexing the words on the website pages and the links to where the words were found. The search engine then stores the data it finds so that you will have access to it.

These robotic spiders are extremely fast, working their way through more than one hundred pages per second at optimal levels. These spiders can notice not only specific words on the web page, but also where on the page the words are positioned. They can also identify meta tags. Meta tags let the owner of the web page select key words and ideas by which that particular page will be indexed.

After the web spiders have found all of this information, they next have to create an index of it and store the index so that you can use it. A search engine's index might include the keyword, the URL, and the number of times the keyword appeared. It might weight a site as more relevant to your search if the keyword appears more often at that site, for example. The specific ways that popular search engines rank material is proprietary, and often changes. The benefit of indexing is that it enables you to find the information you need as quickly as possible.

When you want to boost the effectiveness of your website, and the ease with which visitors will find and use your site, you will want to consider utilizing SEO.


About the Author:
Brandon Thomas is an expert at search engine optimization. Brandon has used SEO as the cornerstone of his internet marketing company (http://www.fruition.net) and always produces measurable results. Brandon offers advice on SEO services and what to look for when considering SEO for your website.

Article courtesy EasyArticles.com