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Jason Hennessey

Guide to Search Engines

How do Search Engines Work?


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The first lesson in SEO that you will need to learn is that Search Engines are not humans. While this might be very obvious, the difference between how many search engines and humans view web pages aren’t. Not like humans, search engines are text driven. Search Engines spend 24 hours a day crawling the web, looking for text to get an idea what a site is about. Keep in mind this is a brief explanation - Search engines also follow advanced algorithms while crawling, indexing, caching, processing, calculating, and retrieving.

The first thing a search engine does is crawl the web to look for fresh information (content). This is known as a crawler, spider, or Googlebot. Spiders spend time following links from one page to another and index anything and everything that they find on their voyage. Now remember, there are over 30 Billion pages on the web, therefore it is impossible for a spider to visit your website daily to see if it has been modified.

Sometimes a crawler may not visit your site for up to three months, so during this time your SEO efforts WILL NOT be rewarded. But there really isn’t anything you can do about it. What you can do is learn something new everyday on this blog, and apply it to your website. Remember crawlers are not humans and they don’t see images, javascript, frames, flash movies, & password-protected pages. They ONLY see text. This is the reason why you never see a fancy flash website sharing in the first positions of Google, Yahoo, or MSN.

Google, Yahoo!, and MSN may seem very similar, however they are VERY different engines, following different guidelines (algorithms). For example, Yahoo! and MSN, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while Google puts a lot more weight on links. Also Google prefers their sites like wine, the older, the better, while Yahoo & MSN don’t really take into factor the age of a specific domain. Therefore you might need more time until your site sits in the top position in Google compared to Yahoo!. That should be enough for today. So much more to come in the coming days, weeks, years.

By the way please feel free to tell your friends about this blog. Think of it as a gift that keeps giving, and they will think of YOU when they have business to refer.

About the Author:


Jason Hennessey is the President of 1WeddingSource, today’s leading wedding social networking planning site. He also founded an online store that host a collection of wedding favors and wedding gifts to make your wedding day an event to be cherished for a lifetime. I'm glad to share to everybody my list of 6290 wedding songs online.

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