Learn seo by learning how google works

How do search engines operate?

Search engines have something called as spiders or crawlers or robots. What spiders do however advanced the web pages are, having flash, dynamic content, Ajax, you name it, these spiders are old school. They look for html links. They go to these big servers and they start going through these pages. They do not actually crawl the web (yes you heard me right). What they do is they simply search the web page index them, go out and come back and repeat the procedure many time over a period of time. They do not go all over the place. They start building a list of words, note, phrases and where they were found. They build and categorize them like a good librarian.
They encode it and get it on their hard drives. So have you ever noticed while searching in Google the search time it took to find articles related to your queries? Well it may be written 0.021 seconds or something similar. So are the search engine spiders going to all the millions of individual sites out there the minute you type in? No. They simply go to the index created by the spiders. You are actually looking at their information at the servers. Then if you are interested in the site displayed you may go into their website.
They have a set of databases and they will compare your website to other pages and look at the keywords on them. After comparison they actually provide you with ranks (Page Rank in case of Google). One more important thing is LINKS. They are significant and are everything to a site.
Consider this. Spider reaches a site A. in site A there is several links and one of those points to SITE B. then the spider goes to site B and follows the links in that site. But consider the case you have a website which is not linked to any others. There is no way for search engines to know such a website exists and you will never get indexed. The fact is that you needn’t submit your URL to search engines. They will automatically find you.
Spiders can’t get inside flash videos or flash content. So text must be prominent in your site. Even google said on their website that they have a hard time indexing dynamic content (If google can’t get into database which creates values on the fly like when clicking buttons). You might want to think about a little bit differently. Ensure there are no road blocks for spiders to crawl your web pages.
Suppose you have an art gallery and pictures are stored into databases and when people click on a particular link these pictures are generated from the database and presented to the user. Well that is great; your website is functioning perfect. But now let us see the point of view of the search engines. These search engines cannot index these products since they are inaccessible and therefore they will not appear in search results there by limiting its exposure.

How search aggregators and Meta search engines work

Some people by default are comparison shoppers. They look on several websites, stores and various other resources before they buy a certain product. What search aggregators and other Meta search engines do is they take results from the top search engines (google, yahoo and msn), combine them into one and rank them either according to their own unique algorithm or randomly. What these sites offer to users is that people need not search on different search engines. Simply type in the keyword and there you are. Complete set of results mixed together from various sources. The problem with these search engines or aggregators is that you have not optimization methods to get on top of their rankings. If you take the case of dogpile, they take results from yahoo, msn and google. Topping their results would mean topping the search engines from which they take search results.

Search engine algorithms

This is perhaps the most important thing to consider while optimizing your website/ blog. Different search engines have different algorithms and these search algorithms change so often. It is needed as loop holes in search engines rankings can be used by black hat SEO’s to obtain unworthy top rankings. One example is miserable failure problem commonly referred to as google bombing. When you typed in miserable failure, the white house website would come in top. Google fixed the problem with an algorithm update. Also algorithm updates are done so as to improve the quality of search results returned to a user, the sole reason for a search engines success and why Google and for that matter any other search engine is still in business.

When you do Search engine optimization, you might need to keep yourself updated about the latest search engine news and algorithm updates. They do not send out and email to all google users that their algorithms change. The problem with algorithm change from a webmaster point of view is that what you do today, thinking would benefit your site greatly would be undervalued tomorrow, the same thing that happened with google removing directory submissions from their guidelines for webmasters. People spent hundreds of dollars in companies that does directory submissions, people spend hundreds of dollars setting up web directories and promoting them, people spent thousands of dollars in setting up a company which dose these services. What is going to happen of them? Most directory submission site’s still fool people knowingly or unknowingly saying that directory submission will help them gain good rankings.

Thanks for reading my article. For more seo related articles visit my seo blog or if you are interested in business then visit my small business blog

 

Great info. I think we all have to go back to basics sometimes and keep up to date about SE changes. Paying attention to Matt Cutts for an example.

 

That'll be a good reading topic for the newbies on the site!

 

Yes it is. I see many forum topics pop up saying how to do seo, what is seo and such basic questions. I will soon launch another series of seo tutorials for free exclusive to dp members.

Keep reading and enjoy the posts. Do not forget to implement them.

 

ya, its helpful for newbies like me, thanks for the information eBusinessCorporate's,

 

it's a pleasure

 

This is good information for individuals just starting out with SEO

 

Precisely. I wouldn't expect 99% of the members in dp to think that this is a great post. But there is 1% who does not know about this and so this is for them.

 

Thanks for sharing great info buddy .
+rep added to you for your brief explanation

Well, i am having many doubts on google algorithm.
I have a domain which is having ZERO inbound links. I haven't posted anything there till now. But tat domain is having PR3. Still i dont know the reason why google as given me pr3.

 

Nice one but this is a generic info. Search engines change their algorithm very often.

 

Yes they change their algorithm very often. but they do not change the way search engine spiders work or how they index web pages. Only the ranking mechanism changes

 

Either you made a mistake in spotting the PR or if it was genuine you wont see it in a couple of days.

 

cool post but a bit long

 

I am seeing pr since 3 months
my domain deafarts.org

 

You are right. But it all boils down to math. The Algorithm that Google uses can be expressed in words and numbers. The geeker you are I think enables you to put the edge on serp listings. If you break down your responses you can build back the Algorithm and code toward it. Google tweaks are offset by build up in percentages and restructures.

 

Thanks for the information.

 

Thank you for sharing. It has been a good informative read

 

Its been great sharing this post guys. You will see more seo tutorials coming your way

 

yes its right, seo is best learned by practical exp.

 

very true. Make mistake and you learn twice as fast