What is a search engine? A search engine is a different type of site on the web which is created to find information that is stored in individual websites for people who type in a keyword or group of keywords seeking information on that topic. Some examples of search engines are Google, MSN, Yahoo, to mention a few. Search engine optimization is a very important process to get your website to the top ten in the search engines.

Search engines usually work a little different from each other but they have a few basic tasks they perform. They search the internet based on the important keywords. They store and index the words they find on the internet and where they find them, such as websites. They allow people to search for the important information they have stored in their index.

Search engines use to have only maybe a few hundred thousand pages indexed as there weren't many computer users. Today a large search engine may have hundreds of millions of web pages indexed as they now have many computer users and a lot of inquiries. Again I need to mention how important it is to get your website optimized to rank well in the search engines.

What are spiders? A search engine indexes files or documents by using special software robots called spiders. These spiders search the internet and so called “crawl” websites searching for information and building lists of important words found on websites.

Spiders usually start at busy sites where there is a lot of activity and crawl through every link on pages of those websites. This crawling quickly spreads out through links. That's why it is good to have reciprocal links with websites with a high page rank.

What is indexing? After the spiders have finished finding information on Web pages, the search engine must store the information in a way that makes it useful. Most search engines store more than just the word and URL. An engine might store the number of times that the word appears on a page. The engine might assign a weight to each entry, with increasing values assigned to words as they appear near the top of the document, in sub-headings, in links, in the meta tags or in the title of the page. Most search engines have a different formula for assigning weight to the words in its index. This is one of the reasons that a search for the same word on different search engines will produce different lists, with the pages presented in different orders. With so many websites on the internet, knowing website optimization is very important.

What happens when you type a keyword into a search engine? The search engine software or program is the final part. When a person requests a search on a keyword or phrase, the search engine software searches the index for relevant information. The software then provides a report back to the searcher with the most relevant web pages listed first. If you have your website optimized well, you will have an advantage over your competition. All rights reserved You have the author's permission to use this article but you must include the author's bio and it's link.