What Are Search Engines?

What are search engines?

According to Wikipedia: A Web search engine is a search engine designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. This information may consist of web pages, images and other types of files.

Search engines assist people to find information on the Internet. The most well known search engines are Google and Yahoo.

How do they work?

Search engines regularly send out automated programs called bots or spiders to “crawl” through the web and read web pages. The spiders then return to the search engine and the results are indexed based on the words in the web pages.

Here’s how it works:

1. Visit the Search Engine home page
2. Type a word or phrase into the search box
3. Search engine (SE) goes to its index and finds the most relevant web pages
4. SE returns a list of web pages relating to the search term (sometimes over a million websites)

NB: Research had shown that most people generally only look at the first three pages of search engine results. REMEMBER THIS POINT.



What are Search Engines? They perform two roles:

1. Provide a service to people on the Internet searching for information
2. Provide a place for businesses to advertise

There aim is to:

• Provide the most relevant information to search engine users
• Provide the best possible result for the businesses advertising with them

There are hundreds of search engines on the web but Google is by far the most sophisticated and the most popular. They do their job very well and are the most used search engine on the Internet closely followed by Yahoo, Live and Ask.

How do search engines relate to my business?

Search Engines are an integral part of your marketing strategy when you are marketing online. They provide free traffic to your website and an opportunity for effective paid advertising. Search Engines are one of the ONLY ways that people are going to be able to easily find your website on the net if they don’t have your website address.

If the purpose of your website is to find new customers and increase profits through increased sales of your product and/or service then traffic from the Search Engines is very important to your Small Business. You will want to be listed preferably on the first page (refer to highlighted point above) of search results for search terms (keywords) related to your business. You may also, as part of your marketing strategy, pay for advertising with the major search engines. Generally, if your campaign is set up correctly, this is money well spent

The major search engines such as Google and Yahoo are the ones that most website owners and developers want their websites listed in because they can bring in free web traffic therefore potentially more customers and sales.

Next: Part 5b What is Website Traffic?

Part 5b What is Website Traffic?

Website traffic and a first page ranking with Google or Yahoo is worth a lot to your business. It is not an easy task and it is best to build your website from scratch with the search engines in mind.