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How Search Engines Work

When a search engine visits a site, it's looking at the "skeleton view" of the page, not the fancy and well-designed website that viewers see. Instead, the engines sees the source code or HTML code of a page.

To give you an idea of what the engines sees, open your browser and go to any web page. If you're using Netscape, click on View, then Page Source. If you're using Internet Explorer, click on View, then Source. You're now viewing the skeleton of the page, which we'll call the source code.

When an engine visits your site, it sees this HTML, or source code. The engines consider anything that's toward the top of the page to be more relevant than anything further down on the page. Therefore, the <head> section of your web page, which is at the very top of the page, is extremely important in terms of relevancy. It contains the <title> tag and META description tag that are used in the search results for most engines (the META tags used to be very important, bus had been abused heavyli, that meanwhile most search engines are ignoring them). Make sure to place your keywords toward the top of the page, in the beginning of your keyword-containing tags, and in the beginning of your body text.

 

Many other factors come into play when determining relevancy, including the keyword weight of the page, how popular the website is in terms of link popularity, how frequently the keywords are used, how close to the root domain the page is, and so forth. Large books are written and complex seminars (see www.searchengineworld.com) are held about how these factores can be optimized. It would go beyond the scope of this site to commend them.

But it is easy to explain, what has to be done by positioning the keywords:

  • Every engine has a different ranking algorithm, which simply means that they each consider different things important or not important when determining relevancy and ranking. Therefore, what works for one engine won't necessarily work for another.
  • Searchengines like simplicity! One has much more success with is's web page if not utilizing techniques like frames, JavaScript, dynamic pages, graphic-intense pages, etc.
  • Because the engines like simplicity, specialists don't overdo things. They start in little steps and work slowly and carefully. If all techniques get implemented at the same time one doesn't win more but risks to probably loose all. There aren't any fix roles or laws in positioning. Professionals work on the base of experience and intuition. Who overdoes the implementation of keywords might get considered a "spammer" by the search engines and therefore beeing excludes of their indices.
  • In most cases, one won't be able to optimize each page of your website for more than one or two keywords. It pays to finetune each page untill it becomes successful. Some engines like for example Google or Altavista take up to two months until the recongnize any changes, because they renew their indices only once a month.
  • Search engines are constantly refining and improving themselves. They're permanently changing their techniques. Through that they protect themselves also from beeing abused. That's why any measures and tricks that are fine for today might not work anymore by tomorrow. Professional positionig is therefore subject of permanent changes and requires regular updates.

Internet-projects can help you to target the right keywords and get the search engine listings necessary to increase your traffic. Our pay-on-success model gives you the assurance that you don't wast your marketing dollars, we only bill you when your pages are inthe position you want them. Read the Details
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    last update: 15-Dec-2004 | www.internet-projects.com
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