Article / Tutorial

The Importance of Search Engines and SEO

Search engines are into providing their users with the most relevant and up-to-date information to match the search term that was used. They are sophisticated pieces of technology which allow users to quickly find relevant websites by searching for a word or a phrase. Search engine results are useless to users if the information doesn't relate to the search term, or if the results are old. People expect the most up-to-date and fresh information that is useful to them.

A recent survey showed that when customers want to find information or to buy a product or service, they find the site in one of the following ways:

• The first option is they find their site through a search engine = 90%.
  
  
• Secondly they find their site by clicking on a link from another website or page that relates to the topic in which they are interested = 8%.
  
  
• Occasionally, they find a site by hearing about it from a friend or reading in an article =2%.

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the potential customers provided that you do your search engine optimization well. When you type a search term, the search engine will sift through the millions of pages it has indexed and present you with a listing that matches your search topic. The searched matches are also ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

How they work: Search Engines use spiders or robots to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A 'spider' is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, reads the content on the actual site, the site's Meta tags and also follows the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so do not create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the site to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

There are thousands of search engines out there. However, customers all use one or two of the top 6 to 7 search engines and these search engines attract more visitors to websites than anything else e.g. Yahoo, Google or MSN. Remember that a prospective customer will probably only look at the first 1-2 pages in the search results.

All search engines employ a ranking algorithm and one of the main rules in a ranking algorithm is to check the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Do not forget that algorithms also give weight to link population (number of web pages linking to your site). So it does matter where your website appears in the search engine ranking.

Updating your website every day and adding unique materials will help you get noticed by the search engines. So, if you are going to sell any type of product or service online, you have to optimize your website for the search engines, in order to boost traffic and sales. It is because over 90% of your business will likely come directly from search engine results. And for that reason, it is absolutely important to optimize your site for search engines for you to have the greatest amount of FREE visitors via the search engines.