It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site’s Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example:  Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

Technorati Tags: search engines, website pages

In the earliest days of the web, when search engine technology was still primitive and search engines’ capability to move the web was somehow limited, it made sense to submit your website.

Search have no problem crawling billions of pages and adding them to their index each month ( and occasionally even more frequently ). Listing your internet site with them will give you a couple of the best links you can get.

Coming up with articles and posting them in sites like ezinearticles or goarticles isn′t just a good way to get links, but also a good way to create yourself as an expert.

In summation, do not squander time, energy and cash submitting your site, or using one of those services that claim to submit your internet site to “thousands of search engines” ( they′re valueless ).

Technorati Tags: Add new tag, article directories, search engines, summit articles

Pay Per Click advertising and can be very effective when used properly. However this type of advertising will cost you some money.

Two of the main pay per click programs are Google Adwords and
Yahoo’s Overture. They provide very popular advertising structures
that will allow you to quickly increase your traffic flow.

These search engines allow you to purchase advertising on a pay
per click basis. With them you are complete control of your
advertising budget.  Which means that you get to choose how
much you want to pay for clicks on your ads. The higher you are
willing to pay, the higher your ad will rank on the search engine
page. Every time someone clicks on the ad you pay and they are
taken to your webpage and your traffic flow will increase.

Pay per click advertising has a bit of a learning curve, so please
be advised that you should take the time learn exactly how the
program works before you begin placing your ads.

Here are the top PPC search engines list here you might interest you.
You can get some free bonus $5.00 to $100 credits to start off with  pay per click serch engines

Technorati Tags: advertising budget, Pay Per Click advertising, search engines

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears  on a web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site. Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it. Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site.It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.here are some simple steps to check the density:

- Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.

- Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total   number of words in the page.

- Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.

- When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.

- Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

To achieve the best results it is important to have the first 250words of your copy be  keyword rich.A good tip is to write your content first, then choose your keywordsand/or keyword phrases from the content. Rewrite your content as needed, adding keywords and/or keyword phrases that pertain to the theme of the content. This way, you’ve chosen keywords and/or keyword phrases that are relevant to your content, instead of trying to write content to fit your keywords and/or keyword phrases.

Technorati Tags: Keyword density, search engines, write content

Basically SEO is a process of choosing the most appropriate and targeted keyword phrases related to your website and working to get them to rank your site in the search engines so that when someone searches for the keywords or phrases it returns your site on the top of the results page.Basic SEO involves fine tuning the content of your site along with the HTML and Meta tags. It also involves a good link building process.The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL and Ask Jeeves.

Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search results and to prevent spam pages from clogging the results. A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually.Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in one search engine could rank #200 in another. New sites don′t necessarily have to be “submitted” to search engines to be listed. A simple link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents.It can take a few days to even weeks from the referring of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to visit and index the new site.

Now let’s talk about how the search engines actually work.They use spiders to crawl your website pages and index them. A ‘spider′ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. The spider visits a web site, reads the content on the actual site, the site′s Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects to.The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well.The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine. A spider is almost like a book that contains a huge table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the web.Different search engines produce different results and rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to get the job done.One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the web. We will continue the part 2…

Technorati Tags: Basic SEO, search engines, SEO Overview