By Jamie Turner, CEO, 60 Second Communications

Here's what you'll learn in this article:

1. How Google, Yahoo, MSN and others search the web and rank your website.

Most of our gentle readers already know how search engine spiders work, but it never hurts to review some of the basics. What follows is an overview so that you’ll have a basic understanding of what goes on next time you visit a search engine.

As you know, there are three primary search engines — Google, Yahoo and MSN. Each search engine has a software program (called a search engine spider) that “crawls” the world wide web and “reads” the content of each web page. Once the search engine spider has read the content of the site (including things like the ALT tags and the META tags), it drops what it finds into an algorithm (which is essentially a fancy word for a “formula”) and figures out what that page in the website is all about.

When someone does a search for, say, “Discount Camera Gear,” the search engine does a ton of calculations to figure out what exactly it is you’re looking for. Included in that calculation is a visit to their gargantuan database which has their algorithmic analysis of all the websites on the planet.

With amazing speed, the search engine spits out a list of websites that probably match what you’re looking for. When you consider the vast amount of calculating power that has to take place in order to spit out 2.8 million websites in 0.33 seconds, it’s mind boggling. (Give it a try. We just typed in “Discount Camera Gear” into Google and, sure enough, it gave us 2.8 million web pages in 0.33 seconds. Do you know what a hassle it was to scroll through 2.8 million websites to check Google’s work? That took us forever!)

That’s essentially how search engine spiders work, which means you now know more about search engines than 83% of the people at your next neighborhood BBQ.

Jamie Turner is the Chief Content Officer for the 60 Second Marketer. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia and loves to travel, so if anyone would like to send him on a free trip to, say, Mumbai or Singapore or Rio, he'd gladly tell you everything he knows about marketing in return for such kindness.

Comment