Search Engine Basics

This is a short article to explain briefly how most search engines basically function, this is useful to know because if you are truly optimizing your site for search engines then you must think about how they are likely to view your site.

To get started search engines have spiders, these spiders crawl websites and look through the content. The search engine then uses an indexer to check whether or not this site is already indexed and if not decides whether it should be upon factors such as content and inbound links, this helps to ensure only useful and relevant sites are added to the search engine hopefully preventing spam pages.

A spider will follow all links on a website that don't have the rel="nofollow" tag. If you consider on your sites homepage you may have links to pages that exist just to help visitors out such as a contact page, then if you add the nofollow tag to that link the search engine won't go to that page but is more likely to go to another page of your site that is more important, this is a good way to optimize your site so that only the pages with the good information on get indexed.

If your site is new then it may be helpful to submit it to the search engines, this adds it to the spiders list of pages to look at, if you don't do this then you will be waiting upon the spider finding a link to your site on another website.

Another quick way to get your site indexed quickly could be to ping it to the social sites or the information sites that provide information upon sites http://growadollar.com/search-engine...h-engines.html

Another search engine term is cache, a cache is a stored version of the webpage that was collected when the spider visited it. When you see a website in a search engine there is usually a button near it that says view cached page, if you click this then you can see how the site looked at the time the spider crawled it.