An Overview - How do Search Engines work & how they rank pages

Indexing of pages:

Search Engines have automated programs which are called spiders, bot which crawl the webpages and pass on the information collected from the crawled websites to their database. Some engines crawl & update their database more frequently than others. Since search engine spiders have a huge number of websites to crawl, they try to stay on a website for the least possible time & collect the maximum information. To save their time & avoid themselves from getting caught in a program, these search engine spiders have stop words like '?', '='. On the occurrence of these words within a webpage URL, they tend do ignore it and hence the page goes un indexed. Usage of frames, links within a website being called from external files, content within flash files & images are also not spider friendly.

Source of database for these spiders:

The database of websites edited & listed by human editors, like Dmoz is one of the source of getting new websites. Hence, it is important to be listed in directories.
Though Search Engines do index and list dynamic pages like ASP, JSP. It's the use of characters like these which becomes a hurdle.

Now, the important question of how do Search Engines Rank Pages:

The listing of websites, on being searched for a keyword/ key phrase, depends on different relevancy factors. The relevancy of a website is judged on it's internal parameters and external parameter being Link Popularity. Previously, it use to be only the internal factors within a website, which use to be responsible for a website's top rankings. But from last few years the trend has changed. Major Search Engines like Google and AltaVista very prominently use the external factors to list websites.

Of the many Internal parameters, the 2 important ones are :

• Content placement: If website A has five products under it's products section and it has listed them all in 1 page. On the other hand, website B also has 5 products, but it has listed them in 5 different pages. Search Engine would give more relevancy to product where they are listed individually.
  
  
• Information provided: 'Content is King' A good amount of information, would not be liked and read by website visitors, but also by search engine spiders too.
  
  e.g. If website A has 1 paragraph on apples and website B has 6 paragraphs of information, listing different types of apples, how are the grown etc. Other than that, website B also offers a report on the best apples around the world, the pricing and quality of them. Search Engines would give more relevancy to website B.
  
  Please note that the information has to be focused and specific to a certain topic only. The more the information is on a broader level, the higher would be your competition online & more difficult to get ranked.

External Parameter:

• Link Popularity: These Search Engines also analyze the Link Popularity of your website. This popularity is in terms of quality & quantity of inbound links to your website. Link Popularity is explained here.
  
  
• Search Listings: When a search is made, there's a basic level of filtering done on the user end itself. This includes excluding parameters like 'and', 'or', 'it' from the search term. Users can also refine their searches by using +, -, " " title, page in their phrases. Then based on the keyword/ key phrase used, search engine uses their algorithm to find the closest related website based on the internal & external relevancy.
  

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