1.04 Introduction to search engines

The major search engines, there are about ten that are important, all work on words. To search, you send a string of words to your chosen search engine. The search engine simply returns a list of web pages, each of which contains all the words in your query.

Indexes
How do the search engines know which pages to return? They maintain huge indexes of all the words from billions of web pages. As I write the Google index holds over four billion web pages. Each search engine continually sends out robot indexing programs to visit and check for changes on all the pages they know about – and to follow links to new sites and additional pages.

Not images, not pretty colours
The search engines may take note that a page has images or whizzy graphics, pretty coloured text or an interesting background - but only as something hanging around with what they are really interested in – words.
The search engines don't see the visible information contained in an image – they just collect the text visible around it. They will take an interest in the sizes and colours you use for the information on your pages – but only to be sure that visitors can see the same words they do. At one time it was possible to hide text and so cheat the search engines by defining white text on a white background or black on black.

Getting indexed
Most of the search engines have a form where you can submit the address of your web site. They prefer, however, to think that they have found your site themselves. The best way to get yourself added to their indexes is to have an incoming link from another site that is already listed.

Ensuring your pages appear in results
To ensure that your pages appear in the list of results when someone searches for “vet in yourtown” then the words “vet” and “yourtown” have to appear together – as words not pictures – on at least one of your pages. If they appear in an important part of your page – like the title. If they appear more than once on a page. If they appear together on more than one page on your site – then your pages are more likely to appear high up in the list of web pages returned when someone searches for “vet in yourtown”.

This the essential essence of the way search engines work. Let's apply this to the content you put online for your potential clients.

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