ptg16476052How Search Engines Work 68925
Search engines, in general, make their money either by other services they offer or by the
ads they show within the search results themselves. The entire purpose of a search engine
is to aggregate information and provide the links to it so that customers can access it.
You Can Do Your Own SEO
The beauty of SEO is that it’s not difficult to do. It can get very complex, requiring
server access and even possibly programming skills, but the basics are easy to understand
and apply to every website. And the beauty of well-done SEO is that it improves your
site for your customers—the people visiting your pages—not just the search engines.
Why Don’t Search Engines Find Sites Without SEO?
You should be aware that search engines do find sites without SEO. The Google spiders
are constantly out crawling the Web looking for new pages and adding them to their
index. Depending on where your site is linked from, it can be found by a spider in as
little as a few hours to a couple of days.
You shouldn’t rely on “security through obscurity” as a way of pro-
tecting your web pages. Just because you have not publicized your
site doesn’t mean it won’t be found. Search robots can fill out
forms, read referral codes, and follow links. And when they come
across new pages, they add them to their index, sometimes even
when you’ve asked them explicitly not to.CAUTIONSearch engines are just computer programs—complex ones, but just programs. The major
search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to improve how their search
results work, how their robots crawl the Web, and how their users respond to the results
they get.
But search results are only as good as the content they have to index. If your web pages
are confusing or hard to read for your customers, it’s likely that they will be confusing
and hard to read for search engine robots. And when the robots are confused, your site
gets buried in the results rather than ranking where you’d like it to rank.
How Search Engines Work
Search engines work using a program, called a robot, to crawl through the Web reading
pages and adding them to their indexes. These programs are sometimes called crawlers
or spiders. Once these spiders have found a new page, they read the HTML (and CSS