Understanding Search Engines

Search Engine Awareness

If you wanted to find out the local weather from a website and didn't know where to look, or who's pitching in next week's home game; or where to buy handblown glass perfume bottles online how would you find it?

From your favorite search engine of course.

As a website owner, what can you do to make your site more attractive to the Yahoos and Altavistas of the web?

Meta-tags

Some of the most important information on your webpages is hardly even seen by the people visiting your site. The meta-tags include the title, description, and keywords. These are used by search engines to describe your site and the pages on it.

For example, the information you put on the description part of a page is likely to be what displays on a search engine if your page comes up on someone's query. Think about how that might work.

You're looking for something on the web and don't know where to find it. So you go to your favorite search engine and type in 'galoshes' and voila! 6,880 results are found, the first 10 being displayed on your screen. You look through those first 10 and what you see is probably the description meta-tags that those sites have put on their pages.

Search Engine Basics

In addition to meta-tagging, there are several other key points to be aware of in the preparation and marketing of your website to search engines (SE's). That's right, I said marketing. Getting good coverage for your website from the SE's is a vital and ongoing part of achieving popularity for your site. Give it the respect and attention it deserves and you will see results accordingly.

Be honest in your meta-tags. In other words, don't try to spam or con the search engines. There are at least two great reasons that this is a poor strategy.

If you do succeed in bringing people to your website with misleading information they will figure it out when they get there. Instead of beginning a long term relationship with someone that can benefit from what your website has to offer, you will have a person that may leave in anger, and worst of all tell their friends.

Search engines have developed many sophisticated methods to determine if a website is being deceptive in its representation of itself. Simply put, this means if your meta-tag description says your site offers free tutorials in Advanced Bridge Playing and your site hardly mentions the game, you may be banned by the SE's for deceptive representation. Honesty is the best policy on the web, as in life.

Links and references to your site coming from other websites are very important in search engine rankings. Think of it from the SE's point of view. Someone visits Google and types in "boneless duck" as their query. A chain of events on the SE's server is now initiated.

A program takes the words in the query and searches the database. A list is prepared of webpages known to contain the phrase requested, followed by occurances of both words but not as a phrase, followed by one or the other of the two words.

How can the SE organize the listing so that the person requesting the links gets the most relevant ones first? Anyone who's used search engines much has learned that sometimes they are very good at it, sometimes not as good.

One way the SEs rank webpages for display on queries is by relevance. Having a page on your site with a recipe for preparing boneless duck means your page should show up on the results to this query. But what if you're competing with 17 other webpages that also have boneless duck recipes? How can the SE decide which pages are most relevant?

Popularity can be a key factor in making this determination. If other webpage, especially on other site are linking to your recipe page, this supports the idea that your recipe is more respected and authoritative than others with similar content. An additional benefit of this is that an SE might actually learn about your webpage by examining the other site's page that links to you.

Search Engine Agents

Also known as spiders, robots or bots. The computer programs that search engines use to gather information about websites to use on their own sites.

Find a listing for your website on a search engine and there's a good chance you'll find the description meta-tag you put on that page being the blurb that is displayed in response to a query.

It's a spider that gets that information. And they can be seen on your server logs.

So, when you see spiders on your log that's a very good sign, because it means the search engines that use those programs have put your site on a list of those that they visit. This is how search engines keep their own listings fresh.

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