Do you know how search engines work?

If you are searching for a particular product or service, what is the first thing you do?  Most of us will go straight online to search our favourite search engine.  Search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo introduce millions of people daily to the prospective customers ready and willing to make a purchase.  With this in mind, if you are an owner of online shop or e-store, it is good to have a basic knowledge of how these search engines work, how they index your website and how your website is presented to the people using these search services. 

There are two types of search engine and they gather and index their listings in radically different ways.

Crawler based search engines index your site based upon many criteria by scanning all aspects of your website such as your website content and links you have with other sites.

Human Powered Directories require you to create a listing for your company and website, supplying all the important information you want during a submission process. This is then reviewed and approved for their directory.

Crawler based Search Engines use spiders to index your website. Submission is done either manually by submitting your website address to a search engine for inclusion, or automatically when your website is picked up by the spiders via a link from another website to yours. In most cases if you do not have a single link to you site, it will not appear in a search engine. By following a link from another site, spiders find your site and the process of indexing starts. Your entire website will then be crawled using a scanner called a spider that is run by the search engine system. The spider then returns its gathered information back to the search engine’s database, where the data is indexed and ready to be searched. It also visits each link you have on your website and indexes all those sites as well.

The spider will return to your website on a regular basis to look for changes so it can update the index with your updated material. 

The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine and is also affected by the number of links you have to and from your website. A strong link building strategy is important!

Search engines use different algorithms to search through their indices.  This means that your shopping cart website will appear in different positions in each of the search engines. Search engines use many criteria in their positioning of your site in their results.

The frequency and position of important keywords on your pages is important, along with analysis of the way your pages are constructed and your links to other pages on the Internet. Many companies use the services of search engine optimisation professionals in an effort to appear higher in search engine results.

Successful optimisation based upon strategically chosen keywords is very likely to increase traffic to their website, thus improving exposure to their target market. Read more information about how effective Search Engine Optimisation could help bring more targeted traffic to your site.