Starting out as a new webmaster, your site will likely be lost in the crowd, buried deep in the search engine results pages. To get that all important search engine visibility, you need to know how search engines work, how they find your site and how they rank web sites. Here is a short and easy introduction that will answer these questions and get you started with the craft of search engine optimization.

How do the Search Engines Work?

A search engine has several components. When you search using Google or any of the other search engines, what’s important to understand is that they do not search the live Internet when they bring back the search engine results pages (SERPs) to you. Instead, they search their own database of web pages, which is also known as their index. Because the search engines search within their own database, they can return website results much quicker than if they had to use the live Internet to get the results for the user.

The search engines have lots of servers, which store all these web pages to better help their users find exactly what they are looking for. Without being indexed in their database on their servers, your website obviously cannot be found in the search engines.

How do the Search Engines Find Your Website (How to Get Listed)?

So this takes us to the next step, how do search engines find your website? They have programs called bots, which are sometimes also called spiders or crawlers, which crawl the Internet and constantly look for as many pages and links as they can. These are then reported back and indexed in their database. They do this to continuously include more web pages in their index, so users like you and me can find relevant websites from the keywords that we search for.

This is the first crawl, called the breadth, which is to find as many documents (pages) as they can. Obviously, the more pages that are indexed in their database, the more options they have to select from to match the specific search query by the user.

Once the search engine crawlers find web pages, they do an in-depth crawl of them (a second crawl), which means they download all the information and links on those pages and report back to the index. Once they have downloaded those pages to their index, they come back to them later to check if there have been any updates since last time. These will then be downloaded and updated into their index.

So practically speaking, how can the crawlers find your website? By having a link from a website that is already indexed in their database and linked to your website, the crawlers will eventually find your website and include your website in their database as well. This is the first step of search engine optimization to make sure that you have all your pages indexed in the search engine’s database.

This is why it’s very important to have search engine friendly and clean website architecture. This ensures that the search engines will be able to find all of the pages on your website as well as download all the information and links on those web pages. This will enable the search engines to follow and finally index your entire website.

How do Search Engines Rank Websites?

Search engines use algorithms to rank websites. Algorithms are basically rules that the search engines use to determine the rankings. Every search engine has its own set of rules of how they rank websites, which is why you see different SERPs from each search engine. This is their own secret recipe of how they rank websites, which they don’t want to reveal to the public.

These algorithms are continuously updated to prevent websites trying to gain higher rankings dishonestly, which is something all the search engines are against. The goal of the search engines is to deliver the most relevant search results to the user, so they try everything they can to make sure the user gets exactly what he or she is looking for. This is why the algorithm has to be updated continuously.

Ethical Search Engine Optimization Practices (White Hat SEO)

Now that you know the motives of the search engines and what they are looking for, what strategies should you use to gain better placements? To gain top placements in the search engines in the long haul, you need to make sure that you abide by their guidelines.

This is also known as white hat search engine optimization, which is the process of optimizing your website based on strategies that are deemed ethical and allowed by the search engines. An important example are the Google webmaster guidelines.

Search engine optimization is not an evil thing and not something the search engines disapprove of. As a matter of fact, the search engines want you to optimize your website as it helps them in the process of ranking websites out of the billions of pages listed in their index (database).

When you apply all the important search engine optimization practices, you will notice that your website will increase in its rankings and you will also stay among the top search results longer.

As the search engines are becoming increasingly complex and because competition is on the rise, it’s crucial that you pay attention to all the elements that will help boost your website’s rankings.

You may, for instance:

• Identify important keywords and keyword phrases that people will use when searching for your type of information, goods or services. Keep in mind that others may use different search queries than you when searching for the exact same thing.
• Include these keyword phrases in the title-field of the web page, as well as in the main headline and in the text itself (But don’t overdo it! That will be considered spam!)
• Include the keyword phrases in other web page elements, like image tags and links to relevant pages on your site.
• The search engine algorithms make use of inbound links to ascertain the popularity and quality of your site. You therefore need to promote your article, site or blog. You may, for instance, make use of social media site like twitter. You can write for others sites and include a link to your site in the text. You may also write to other webmasters and ask them for a link, if it is relevant for their site.

The next step

You can learn the search engine optimization basics from reading articles on Pandia, but if you want to fine tune your search engine optimization skills, it will make sense to get more information from other search engine professionals.

One way is to take part in search engine marketing conferences. It is amazing what you can learn from sharing experiences over a meal.

Still, before you get to that point we recommend that you take one of the online courses on search engine marketing and optimization — one like The Professional’s Training Course in SEO .

Courses like this one will teach you the basic vocabulary, the tricks of the trade and how to avoid beginner’s mistakes. In the long run that will save you a lot of pain!

photo credit: Match Factory

Disclosure: Pandia is a Professional’s Training Course in SEO affiliate