Search Engines and the Small Business Website

Posted by John

January 5, 2008

If you're doing any type of business on the internet than
search engines like Google and Yahoo! could play a large role in the success or
failure of your business. Even though most internet user have experience using
search engines, many don't know how the engines work.

For website owners
it is important to understand how, at least at a high level, search engines work
so they can take advantage of the website traffic that only search engines can
deliver.

Search Engines are special sites on the Web that are designed to
help people find information stored on other sites. There are differences in the
ways various Search Engines work, but they all perform three basic
tasks:

- They search the Internet or select pieces of the Internet based
on important words,
- They keep an index of the words they find, and where
they find them, and
- They allow users to look for words or combinations of
words found in that index.

Early Search Engines held an index of a few
hundred thousand pages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousand
inquiries each day. Today, a top Search Engine will index hundreds of millions
of pages, and respond to tens of millions of queries per day.

Before a
Search Engine can tell you where a file or document is, it must be found. To
find information on the hundreds of millions of Web pages that exist, a Search
Engine employs special software robots, called spiders, to build lists of the
words found on Web sites.

When a spider is building its lists, the
process is called web crawling.

In order to build and maintain a useful
list of words, a Search Engine's spiders have to look at a lot of pages. How
does any spider start its travels over the Web? The usual starting points are
lists of heavily used servers and very popular pages. The spider will begin with
a popular site, indexing the words on its pages and following every link found
within the site. In this way, the spidering system quickly begins to travel,
spreading out across the most widely used portions of the Web.

To
increase the likelyhood that the spiders find your website make sure you are
listed on high ranked websites like Merchant Circle. You can create a free
business page and blog that will not only increase your chances of being found
but also be another place for potential visitors to find about about your
website.

Once the spiders have completed the task of finding information
on Web pages, the Search Engine must store the information in a way that makes
it useful. There are two key components involved in making the gathered data
accessible to users:

- The information stored with the data, and
- The
method by which the information is indexed.

In the simplest case, a
Search Engine could just store the word and the URL where it was found. In
reality, this would make for an engine of limited use, since there would be no
way of telling whether the word was used in an important or a trivial way on the
page, whether the word was used once or many times or whether the page contained
links to other pages containing the word. In other words, there would be no way
of building the ranking list that tries to present the most useful pages at the
top of the list of search results.

To make for more useful results, most
Search Engines store more than just the word and URL. A Search 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. Each commercial Search Engine has 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.

You can
get a customized Page Critic Analysis Report from Webs 4 Small Business that
tells you how YOUR webpages should be set up to make sure give the search
engines what they are looking for when they review your page.

An index
has a single purpose: it allows information to be found as quickly as possible.
There are quite a few ways for an index to be built, but one of the most
effective ways is to build a hash table. In hashing, a formula is applied to
attach a numerical value to each word.

The formula is designed to evenly
distribute the entries across a predetermined number of divisions. This
numerical distribution is different from the distribution of words across the
alphabet, and that is the key to a hash table's effectiveness.

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.

Not
sure what keywords you should use? Picking the right, or wrong ones, can make or
break your chances at online success. Consider getting a customized Key Word
Report from Webs 4 Small Business that tells you which keywords you should and
should not consider for your site. These keywords are specific to YOUR website
not a generic list of keywords.

So, why are search engines important to
business website owners? Simple. You need traffic and Search Engines have lots
of it. And, their purpose is to drive traffic to sites that they think match
their visitors' needs.

The way to get a portion of that traffic, is to
optimize your website (you've likely heard of Search Engine Optimzaiton or SEO).
That way when a someone searches for a keyword that is relevant to your website,
the search engines includes a link to your website in the search results. That
puts traffic and potential visitors just a click away from you website.

Article
Source: http://www.content.onlypunjab.com

Visit Webs 4 Small Business at www.Webs4SMB.com to learn more
about how we can help you optimize your website. You can also 'jump to the first
of the line' with Paid Search Engine listings. Find out how you can get
Guaranteed Website Traffic from search engines at www.webs4smb.com/guaranteed-traffic/guaranteed-website-traffic.htm.
For more tips on how to market a small business website visit internet-marketer-handbook.blogspot.com

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© Copyright 2009, John A. Simpson. All Rights Reserved.