How Do Search Engines Work?

It is the search engines that finally bring your web site to the notice of the prospective customers. If you have an auto dealership or you are a dentist who utilizes dental advertising, it is helpful to understand how these search engines arrange and rank information in response to a search query.

Search engines employ crawlers or “spiders” to index web sites like Facebook, or a dental marketing site. After you submit your web site pages to the search engine, the spider will then crawl through the information and then index all information from each of your web pages. A spider is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. The spider visits a web site, reads the content on the actual site, the site’s meta tags and also follows 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 web site and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

A spider always goes back to the submitted sites to check for updates to content. Search engine moderators decide the frequency of a spider’s return visits to sites.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the web sites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Search Engine examples: Duck Duck Go, Bing, Ask, Dogpile and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information on Aston Martin or dental marketing ideas, it is actually searching through the index on those topics, which it has created but 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, which manipulates the relevance of information retained within a search engine. 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 both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.