6 Things You Need To Know About Search Engines

Wednesday, October 29th 2008, by Adam Barger

Get top rankings on major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN isn't easy. Everybody knows if you can obtain top rankings on these search engines for keywords and phrases relevant to your products or services you're virtually guaranteed some level of success. In order to rank well with these search engines you'll have to have some basic understanding of what they are, and how they work. In this article I'm going to go over the basics you need to know about search engines. You'll then be able to use this information to make strategic decisions about your website that will lead to better rankings and more traffic.

1. Search engines are not people.

Although search engines demonstrate some characteristics of artificial intelligence they are limited to the way they interpret information. They are in fact computers and for that reason they interpret information quite literally. And because they're computers search engines only know what we tell them through our published content.

2. Search engines love text.

Search engines love text for a lot of reasons. Storing text requires less storgage and organizing it requires less computing power. In addition search engines cannot recognize or read images. When you see something like Google image search it only knows to return specific images for keyword searches because of the context of the image on a page, a tag, or some other input provided by human about that image. Another thing to keep in mind is that search engines cannot read text that is in an image. So if you want search engines to like your website or to know something about it make sure you have plenty of text on your pages.

3. Search engines need to "crawl" your page to know you exist.

For search engines to gather information on your web pages they have to "crawl" you site. This means they send out a software program to your site that gathers information about your site (primarily text) and reports it back to it's main computers. Once the main computer receives this information it decides where your information should rank and which keywords and phrases it should appear under. Often times this software that crawls your site is referred to as a "spider". This "spider" "crawls" the "web" by following links from one page to another to another. For this reason it's important to get other websites to link to your website. If you cannot get a link to your website from another site you need to tell the search engine you exist by submitting your URL to the search engine directly. If you upgrade to a WebStarts Pro Account your web pages are automatically submitted to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

4. Search engines love it when you tell the truth.

Search engines love relevancy and for that reason they love it when you tell them the truth about your web page. If you try and trick search engines that your page is about one thing when it's actually about another it will consider you to be a less relevant result and rank you low. For this reason it's important your page title, meta keywords, and meta description tell about the actual content that is on your page.

5. Search engines like new stuff.

Search engines hate duplicate content. Duplicate content is any content on your site that can be found elsewhere on the web. A search engine figures "why would I want to waste my time and resources recording inforomation from your website that I alreay have found elsewhere." For this reason you should never copy and paste content from other websites. Natually this doens't mean you can't get ideas for your content from other sites. Just make sure whatever text appears on your website is in your own words. The best thing you can do is up come up with your very own original stories and ideas. Search engines are always looking for something new and interesting to report on.

6. Don't go stale.

Search engines like websites that are frequently updated. Search engines figure people are looking online for the latest information and for that reason give extra credit to websites that consistantly provide them with new data. In fact search engines will send their spider to crawl your website more frequently if they anticipate  you will have something new for them.  If each time a search engine visits your website there is something new it will want to visit your site more and more frequently. This will give the opportunity to get found for more and more searches.

When it comes to search engines these six things are just the tip of the iceberg. But by understanding even a few of these basic principles you'll be in a better position to get your website found on search engines. To find out everything you need to know to get top rankings on Google, Yahoo, and MSN download our ebook https://webstarts.com/cydec/cart/quickbuy.php?16_1 It's a must have resource for anyone who wants to make money.