Understanding Search Engines Part 1: Indexing

SEO is the on page and off page optimisation of a web page in order that it ranks high enough in the search engines to direct traffic from the result pages. There are no short cuts and for the new SEO a big part of any SEO project is first learning as much as possible about the task at hand. Learning as you go may not only lead to ineffective results but could actually hamper your chances of ranking highly in the future.

Search engine optimisation is all about ranking in search engine indexes and so learning how the search engines work should be the first step. Too all intents and purposes, a search engine is a huge index of documents that are stored online. The documents are indexed according to relevant keywords and are displayed according to their perceived relevance for that keyword. When a user searches the index they are given a result of all the pages, or documents, that have been indexed by the search engine and are believed to be related to the search term used.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN use spiders to crawl the Internet passing from link to link and indexing every page they come to, storing relevant information. By ensuring that your web pages have links pointing to them you are also ensuring that those pages will be indexed so one of the first stages in an active SEO campaign is to help the search engine spiders find your web pages.