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How Do Search Engines Work
You probably use a search engine every time you’re on the Internet. A search engine is simply a way for you to find what you are looking for on the Internet. If you are looking for collectable typewriter ribbon tins, you go to a search engine such as Google.com and type in collectable typewriter ribbon tins. The search engine displays a list of relevant search results, with the most relevant pages appearing at the top of the list. These are the links most people click on first. For this reason you always want your web page to appear as high as possible in the list. To better understand how to prepare your website for getting the most out of search engines, you need to understand how search engines work:
1. You add your website to the Internet. At first, when your site has been added, no search engine knows your site even exists.
2. A spider finds your page. Search engines use robotic programs called spiders. These spiders crawl the Internet following every link, gathering information about every page they find, and then reporting back to the search engine what they find. Spiders also count the frequency of words used on your page to get some idea of what your page is about.
3. Search engines compile the information. The search engine then compiles all the information from all the spiders and determines how to rank the pages based on their individual logic. Each search engine is a little bit different.
4. A visitor institutes a search and finds your page. When people use a search engine and type in words that match the ones found on your website, they find your website. If you go to a search engine and look for your website, what do you find? If you type in your URL, more than likely your website will come up high in the list (you hope at the top), but people might not know the URL of your site. You need to give them a way to find your site based on keywords.
Optimizing Your Site for Search Engines
Just because your site is listed on a website doesn’t mean you will get millions of hits. Your website might be listed but very far down on the list of websites. Search engine optimization helps your website move up the list. These are some search optimization techniques.
Keywords
Keywords are simply words or phrases that describe your website and appear on it. For example, if your website is about knitting, there may be many words you use regularly on the site, such as needles, gauge, or yarn. These are the words that search engines use to catalog your site.
Meta Tags
The search engine spider crawls your website and finds most of the words that represent your website. You can add words in a meta tag in HTML that is specifically catalogued by web spiders. Remember, this is an aid to the search engine, not a guaranteed top ranking on a results page. The following are HTML meta tags:
■ Description — This tag enables you to write a description in your own words that some web crawlers catalogue. This gives you some control over what appears as a description in the page rankings.
■ Keywords — This tag enables you to specify keywords you want to emphasize that might not appear in your page.
To add a meta tag to your page, follow these steps:
1. Open your web page in your HTML editor.
2. In the <head> tag insert a new line.
3. Type the following:
<META name=”description” content =”The description of your website”> <META name=”keywords” content=”Keywords for your website”>
Although you want to increase your web traffic, don’t try to “game the system” by adding search terms you think will be popular. It is considered bad form, and if people come to your site expecting one thing and find something else they probably won’t return. Focusing your description and keywords on what your site is really about will make it easier to find and more enjoyable for your visitors.