As you a user, when you need to find information on a topic, you use search engines to get a listing of web sites related to the topic of interest. As a webmaster, you want your site to be one of the first ones the user will see. With all the competition out there, how can you, the web designer, make sure you are noticed? That is where effective search engine optimization comes in. Basically, optimizing refers to fine-tuning a website to achieve optimum search results. This is not a one-time process. Optimization is an on-going process that requires key pages to be resubmitted every couple of months and important new pages as they appear. But, it’s not enough to optimize web pages for search engines. You still have to submit them for indexing. How Search Engines Work The term search engine is frequently used to describe both crawler-based search engines and human-powered directories. These two types of search engines gather their listings in very different ways. Crawler-Based Search Engines
Crawler-based search engines, such as Google, produce their listings automatically. They act like a spider crawling through the website and then people search through what they have found. Hence the term, crawler-based. If you modify your web pages, crawler-based search engines eventually finds these modifications, and that can change how you are listed. Web page titles and headings, body content and other elements all play a very important role in achieving this. There are three major elements to crawler-based search engines—the spider, the index, and the search engine software. Spider The spider, also called the crawler, visits a web page, reviews it, and then follows links to other web pages within the same site. This is what is referred to when a site is being “crawled” or “spidered”. The spider returns to the website on a frequent basis, perhaps every couple of months, to.
