It is important that you understand how the search engines work and exactly how they present the information to the person carrying out the search as this is the way in which your website is brought to the attention of potential customers.

In a very simple way, as you may know a spider is robotic program used by the search engine system to index websites. When you complete the submission page to put your website forward to a search engine, the search engine spider will index your site as a whole. The spider visits the website, reads the content therein, the Meta tags and also follows the links on the site to see the other websites where your visitors will be referred to. After this the spider gets all the information it has gleaned together and places it in a central store where it is indexed. Due to the fact that some spiders will only index so many pages of your site, it is advisable not to create a website with too many pages.

From time to time the spider will revisit the site to see if anything has changed and the moderators of the search engine dictate how regularly this revision takes place. A spider which may index as many as a million pages each day is similar to a book, in that there is a table of contents, followed by the actual contents and all of the references and links it finds for other websites throughout the search. Some examples of search engines are AltaVista, Excite, Google and Lycos. The search engine locates the requested information by looking through the index as opposed to the World Wide Web. As not all search engines use the same algorithm, you will find the search engines produce a variety of results.

Keywords and their frequency and location are one of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for on a web page, but it is also excellent at picking up artificial keyword stuffing, also known as spamdexing. The algorithms will then scrutinize the way in which pages link to other pages allowing the search engine to detect what the page is about when the keywords of the linked pages are not dissimilar to those of the original page.