Basics of Search OR How My Site Gets Recognized
Ok, I will promise one thing: once you understand the basics of how a search engine orders results, mastering the parts that a search engine cares about is pretty easy. I am going to start with a basic story of how a search engine works, and then in future articles do a deeper dive for each element that a search engine uses to determine your ranking position.
The Spider Bot
Any search engine (Yahoo!, Google, Bing, etc) uses something called a search engine bot that spiders the web looking at different sites.
Translation:
Search engine bot = Automated program that never stops running.
Spiders the web = Clicks on links.
The bot starts on a specific page of a single Web site, clicks all the links on that page, visits all those pages, clicks all the links on those pages, and visits all of those pages. The little guy repeats this process, endlessly churning through all the interconnected pages of the Internet.
Historically, the usual starting point for the search engine bots is a place called dmoz. This place is nothing but a Yellow Pages directory-style site with different categories and lists of sites under those categories. From there, the little guy just goes and goes through as many sites as it can.
The first step in getting a site recognized is getting a link to it from a site that the search engine already knows about. So, if you have a new site, I would recommend doing all of the following to ensure that you get picked up by the bots as soon as possible:
1) Submit your site to either DMoz or Google.
2) Get a link back from a friend's site that has already been visited by the search engine bot. An easy way to tell is if you do a search for your friend's site and they come up (this indicated they have been visited by the search engine bot).
3) Do a search for yourself, and if any of your Facebook, Linkedin, or Myspace profiles come up, put a link to your new site on your profile.
OK, now that we have the basics of how a search engine gets to your site. Next week we will cover the parts of your site that the engine cares most about when crawling your site.
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