Search Engine Basis
Date: 18 June 2007

To understand more about site optimisation, it is important to understand at least a little of how search engines work.

Very very simplistically, search engines are huge computers with catalogues of all the websites and pages that they have found on the Internet. They find sites and pages by using automatic “robots” to follow links around the Internet and catalogue (index) everything they find. The most commonly used search engine at the moment is Google (www.google.com), followed by Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) and MSN (www.msn.com or www.live.com). Google will normally find and index a new site / page within days, but it may not come up in the search results for many months, if ever.

Search engines are just automated tools and the main thing they use to interpret what your web site is about, is what they find in the words on the site. They also take notice of links between web sites and other factors, but we will discuss these later.


In our next article we will investigate the importance of the words on your site in more detail. In other articles we will also tell you what keywords, Meta tags and some of these other terms mean. In the meantime, reflect on whether your site includes the words and phrases that you think your prospects might search for.

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