How do search engines find my website?

How does a search engine "search"?

Search engines scour the website for new content all the time.  The three largest search engines are Google, Yahoo, and MSN - listed in order of market share with Google owning more than half the search engine market.

Search engines use spiders

Search engines use robots (aka Spiders) to crawl the Internet for new and updated content.  They follow hyperlinks to navigate around your website, as well as to jump to external sites that contain related content.  When a search engine finds a page, it analyzes the page to find its identity and its prominence on the Internet.  The prominence, or, as Google calls it, PageRank of a page, is decided by internal as well as external factors.  Long story short, if a search engine likes your page, it will index it in its massive search database (the database that is queried when people conduct searches via google.com).  Getting your pages indexed is the first successful step in your search campaign.

How to get your pages indexed by search engines

There are two key elements that help a website page get indexed by search engines:

1. SEO - you need to create Search Engine Optimized pages.  This involves coding your website in a way that pleases search engine spiders.  Our next article shows you exactly how to do this.
2. SEM - Search Engine Marketing.  This involves building a campaign that works to promote your page on the Internet.  One of the key elements to ranking a page highly is gathering quality, relevant links to your site, but there's more to it than just that.  Future articles will delve into the details behind a successful search marketing campaign.

Next up: SEO 101

The next article in our getting started series, which will give you a firmer grasp on how exactly to conduct search engine optimization on your website, is SEO 101.