How to Search Engines Works?

In Seo Basics Tutorial, Search engines work on the crawler-based (both Google and Yahoo fall in this category). Each search engine has its own automated program called "spider" or "web crawler" that crawls the web. The main purpose of the spider is to crawl web pages, read and collect the content, and follow the links (internal and external). The spider then deposits the information collected in the search engine database called the index.

When searchers enter a query in the search box of a search engine, the search engine’s job is to find the most relevant results to the query by matching the search query to the information in its index.

What makes or breaks a search engine is how well it answers your question when you perform a search. The higher your page ranks for these factors (yes some factors are more important than others) than the higher your page will get displayed in the search engine result pages.

It use a concept known as key words and phrases (as found in your page titles, headers, meta tags and your body text) to determine if a particular URL is relevant to what a user is searching for. This is logical since that is what the user sees but webmasters in their zeal to rank higher have often overemphasized keywords and so today search engines are placing a higher importance on keywords included in Anchor Text links ( links in the form <ahref="http://www.yoururl.com> Anchor text </a> where the bolded portion is where your keywords go). Either way the proper use of keywords on your site has much to do with your search engine rankings and the resultant traffic.

A key word can be one or combinations of several words which best describe what your web page is about or has to offer. This page is, for instance, targeting the term SEO and keywords.

Given that there are over 25 million active websites as of this writing there is no likelihood that any of your web pages can be accurately described by a unique key word or phrase. So when a search engine needs to decide which of the billions of pages in their index may be relevant to your particular search, they use a variety of algorithms which are primarily based on their analysis of the word content of the sites they have indexed.