When promoting your web site or online business most webmasters are looking for more targeted visitors. Search engine optimization otherwise known as SEO can help you accomplish that goal. Sometimes small changes in SEO can bring your website a tremendous amount of traffic by bringing your website closer to the top of search engine results.
A search engine searches the web for information on relevant topics found on web sites. Searches on the internet are done using keywords. Search engines index keywords and the sites where they located them. For instance, if you search for the keyword vitamin, the search engine will return a list of sites that contain the word vitamin. Search engines sort through the endless data so searchers can find whatever it is they are searching for.
In order for a search engine to be able to provide relevant results it has to find the information for itself. This is done using what are called web robots or spiders. The search engine spiders always "crawl" pages looking for new content. Once they find this information it is organized and indexed into a list. In looking for new information the web spiders generally begin on popular sites. From there they spread out following every link on the website. They index the words on the web sites and in the links keeping track of where they were found.
The spiders can work extremely fast, covering about 100 pages per second. Spiders crawl web pages from behind the scenes, from top to bottom, left to right, much like we read the page. The keyword closest to the top is given more relevance. So are words in bold, title text, underline, italicized or highlight.
Spiders read the Meta tags, not just the text you can see. Meta Tags allow you to chose keywords to help in indexing your site.
Once the information is found and indexed it is organized to be used by searchers. The index includes the key word or key word phrase, The URL, and how many times the keyword appeared on the page. The job of the search engine is to return the most relevant results for your search, so key words are weighted based on the density of the keyword on the site.
The specifics of how the search engines work is a highly guarded secret. It is important to understand some of the basics of how the search engines work in order to optimize your page for the search engines.
If you want to maximize the traffic you receive from search engines it is important to practice good SEO. There's a tremendous amount of information available on the Internet including articles, eBooks and even free courses teaching SEO techniques.
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Rob Emmerson is a leading expert in SEO and has written extensivly on the subject in articles and eBooks. He offers a
free SEO Course to anyone interested in learning SEO . in addition he writes an
SEO Blog where he shares tips and tricks to help improve your SEO.
