ARTICLE
High Level Studios Understand Search Engines www.highlevelstudios.com Search engines are very complex at the root, but very rudimentary by nature. On March 13, 2009, the World Wide Web celebrated only 20 young years of existence, so it is considered to be a relatively new field. Search engines are designed using complex algorithms based on statistical information to determine placement of where your site should be located in the search engine result pages. There are differences within each search provider and they are patented by them individually as well. In this book we will focus on Google, Yahoo and MSN. I choose to focus on these three because they are the currently the most popular search engines. Prior to search engines, there was no way to index information so it could be referenced quickly. We were lucky to have grown up with libraries that utilized the Dewey decimal system, but have advanced greatly from that time. Once databases of information were created and locked together, we were able to quickly and accurately access the information we need for a particular situation or topic. That is why I am so pleased to live in the current information age. Almost all information can be obtained using a few keystrokes. It is no longer necessary to take a long trip to the library and endure many hours of research. It is now possible to obtain the same amount of information within minutes. Search engines with the ability to index large amounts of information have, and will continue, to advance the education of mankind. As both attention span shortened and attendance at the library dwindled, the information on the internet continued to grow. Today we are faced with a battleground of companies and marketing personnel trying to understand what they can do to gain more attention and audience market share. They often turn to web experts, such as myself, to tell them what can be done to improve their placement on search engine result pages. The answer has always been the same. It comes down to inbound links, page rank, site structure and content. If there is nothing else you should take from reading this, it should be that content is king. There is nothing more important to the advancement of your website than the content that resides within the site itself. If you don’t have a website with good content, then you don’t have anything to begin with. Write about something you have knowledge about and make sure your verbiage is correct. This is very important to the information architecture of the site as well as search engines. Remember, MSN is four times slower to show search results than Google or Yahoo. When indexing, search engines usually start at a large website. From there, they follow every page and link they find while indexing each page and link they arrive at. They go from page to page and link to link until they hit the site where they began. This is how spiders and robots crawl through the web and read the information on every website to determine how it should appear in someone’s search.