What is a Search Engine?
Understanding Search Engines and their importance is the first aspect of Search Engine Optimization.
A search engine is web based data center that collects information form the entire Internet.
Search Engines are computer-based program commonly know as Spiders to seek out and gather information from web site pages all over the Internet. Another commonly used term for this action is called a Crawl.
When the spiders report information back to the search engine, the results are categorized and collated so that the information is instantly retrievable. When a Spider reports information back to a search engine about a specific web site or web page and the data is accessible, that web site or web page is called indexed.
To access information or data from a search engine, you supply a Keyword or Keyword Phrase on the topic of information you wish to access. The search engine will supply all references of data for that specific keyword that in contained in the Search Engine Data Center. How the data is sorted and reported varies among each search engine.
The results of a Keyword search are usually called SERPs (acronym for Search Engine Results). Major Search Engines include Google, Yahoo and MSN. Each of these Search Engines uses different criteria for sorting and reporting their data. Google, Yahoo and MSN each store information from billions of web pages.
The results of the keyword search or SERPS as stated above are unique and different for every search engine, but by understanding those differences you can improve the position of the keyword search engine results. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is the process of making changes and using methods to improve the position of SERPS for keywords.
Importance of Search Engines.
Search engines account for approximately 80-90% of most websites traffic.
A strong and top presence in the search engine results is the difference from
a website that generates traffic and sales or one that is just a waste of bandwidth.