What is search engine?

A search engine is system dedicated to retrieve information on World Wide Web using keywords or phrases. This is usually done by maintaining an index of Web resources (HTML documents), so you can easily search for the information you are looking for. Search engine automatically search the contents from other systems and creates a database of results. These programs are normally called "spiders" or "robots".

Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, Info seek and AllTheWeb are all famous search engines. Their index has million of pages on the web. Search engines can locate related information on internet, based on titles, keywords and text in the web pages and web resources. When you are looking for something using a search engine, it is a very good idea to use the Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT).

What is search engine optimisation?

Search Engine Optimisation is also knows as the "SEO". It is a general term used for websites to getting good rankings in search engines against specific keyword or phrases. It is process of fine tuning the contents of website and also updating the code of web pages (HTML) and focusing on targeted keywords, phrases related to domain, ensuring that site will place well in search engines when targeted keywords or phrases queried in search engines.

Ultimate goal of search engine optimisation is to rank favourably with search engines and increasing the visibility of website in major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alta-Vista and many many others. Search Engine Optimisation is the art of gaining top rankings in search results against your targeted keywords, phrases used by your targeted audience.

How search engine rank web resources?

In the race of search engines, there are two major search engines in front of us, first one is the Google and second is Yahoo. Both are the crawler base search engines, mean their crawler, spiders goes on the different machines and indexes the web pages in their database.

When you are looking for something specific on any search engine, it will sort out the million of pages it knows and rank those pages and most relevant results will come first. Some times, search engines gets the non related pages and some time it may take a little confuse to find what you are looking for. But search engines are really doing an amazing job.

If you are looking for a book in a library, you can ask you're librarian about a specific book. Librarian will tell, guide you about book and he has also experience in his field. But unfortunately search engines are not human beings and they also have no experience, as human have. How ever a search engine follows the few rules to rank pages, against the user query.

• Web pages having search term in the HTML title tag are assumed more relevant by search engines than other pages.
• If you're mentioning the search keyword form start of the page, in headings and paragraph, then search engine will assume this page more related to the search term.
• Search Engine will also analyse how often the search keyword appearing in relation to other words.
• Good quality independent contents, describing the collective theme of the website as well as of current page.
• Link analysis is one of the major factors in search results ranking. By analysing how pages are linked with each other, search engine can determine the importance of a web page and also can boost ranking of pages.
• Click through is also an important measurement. If a page has more clicks through against a search term, it will get high rankings for next time.

Search Engines and Spam

As search engines are playing an important role in current businesses. Some people, company's uses spam techniques to increase their rankings in search engines, such type of search engine optimisation also known as "Black Hat SEO". I am mentioning few of the techniques as example:

• Most common techniques used by most seo's are creating the doorway pages.
• Hidden text, it could be in any shape, like in same font colour as the background or placing data in HTML comment tags.
• Image alt tag, could also be used in negative manners. Some people insert very small images in their pages and put the relevant, irrelevant text in the alt tag. Putting too much text in alt tag could also be considered as spam by search engines.
• Meta tags are not visible by human eye; these are used for the search engines. Placing too much contents and repetitive keyword in Meta tags considered as spam.
• Shadow domains.
• Sneaky redirects and cloaking.
• Loading pages with irrelevant text.
• Creating too many sub-domains.

by Imran Khan
Webmaster at SEO Bank Limited