How Search Engines And Seo Work Together
Author: Hunter Blyth

Nowadays, research and information seeking is commonly done
over the Internet. If you wish to know about something, all you
have to do is type in the keywords on the search bar, click the
button next to it, and then a list of relevant sites that have
information connected to your search appears on your screen.

Sites that help you do the `searching' are called search
engines. Major search engines today include Google, Yahoo!, Live
Search by Microsoft (formerly MSN), Askcom (formerly AskJeeves),
and AOL.

How do these sites search up the web for the information you
need? The process is technical but could be explained in simple
words – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy,
and retrieving.

First of all, search engines search or `crawl' the web to see
what kind of information is available. Crawling is performed by
the software called crawler or spider. The crawler follows links
from page to page and then they index whatever information they
come across. If a site or link is crawled and found to be
relevant, it is then marked or `indexed' by the crawler and then
stored into a giant database so it can be retrieved later.
Indexing involves identifying words and expressions that best
describe the page and then assigning it to particular keywords.

When a web surfer performs a search, the request for
information is then processed. Processing is the comparison of
strings in the search request with the indexed pages in the
database. For example, if you type in the word `Internet' on the
search bar, the search engine scans through its database for
indexed pages that contain the word `Internet'.

Since it is most likely that many pages would contain the word
`Internet', the engine would then calculate the relevance of the
pages in its index to the search string or the word. After the
search has been processed, results will now be retrieved by
displaying them in the browser or the hundreds of pages that
appear on your screen that contains lists of relevant sites you
could visit.

There may be times when you do a search over the Internet and
the results you get are not that relevant or the relevant sites
are on the bottom part of the list. This is because sometimes
there are websites that contain useful information but are not
`search engine friendly'. Meaning, the site's design or pattern
is not that easily recognizable by search engines. Cases like
this could be frustrating to both the information seeker and the
website owner.

This is where SEO comes in. Search engine optimization is about
making websites more accessible to search engines to better
display results and accurately rank them in terms of relevance
to a search topic. What SEO does is that is tailors a website's
design or structure to the pattern that could be easily indexed
and processed by search engines. This could be done by improving
the site content, selecting a proper domain name, putting
keywords, text formatting, internal linking, etc.

Search engines are always seeking ways on improving their
technology to be able to crawl the web deeply and provide
relevant results to users. Websites undergoing SEO help not only
the users but search engines as well by making information
seeking and providing easier for everyone.


About The Author: Hunter is an article writer for Dolphin
Promotions a Web Design and SEO company.
http://www.dolphinpromotions.co.uk/