What is Search Engine?

A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results and are often called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories, which are maintained by human editors, search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human input.

There are some main players which you must always consider optimising for, namely Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, and AskJeeves.

Although Google makes up for almost half of worldwide searches, it is not always a good tactic to relate your site prominence only on Google.

Each search engine searches the web and ranks sites differently, so when you may be at the top of one search engine, you might not even be listed on another one.

Search engine market shares in November 2010 for searches in the USA.

How a search engine works

1.Search engines use programs called spiders, or bots, to search the internet and document their findings.

2.Spiders firstly go to a webpage and analyse it.Goes through the HTML code and categorises the most important words (keywords) in the document.

3.It then moves on to any pages that linked from the current page.

·This is one way how search engines find new pages.
·It also visits pages that may not be linked by other pages, but were submitted by search engines.

What a search engine sees

Spiders do not see a page like humans do, as it cannot describe an image, or tell you how pretty a site looks.

Instead, it looks at the HTML code and structures it to make sense.

Using a text browser, or disabling images and CSS are a good way of seeing your site through a search engines eyes.

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