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July 4, 2008 How do search engines work ?Search engines, such as google.com, use a special web browser called a spider or robot to follow (or crawl) all of the links on a web page and report back to a master database. Part of the search engine optimisation process is designing your site to ensure that your links are visible to the search engine's spider. The pages a spider finds are analysed and given a ranking according to each search engine's individual rule set. Generally speaking, a page achieves high rank by having relevant, well written copy on the page, and by the links that exist between it and other pages on the site, and also on the web as a whole. Your website's log files will tell you which spiders are actively indexing your site's content. If you have access to your log files (often these can be retrieved by using an ftp program) you can analyse the logs using a web statistics package like the excellent Analog. Alternatively your web hosting company may be able to provide online web analysis software like awstats at a small extra cost. A crucial part of an overall search engine optimisation strategy is search engine submission, which tells individual search engines to send their spider to visit your site so that it's content can be indexed and your pages ranked. |
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