Search Engines: Getting Found (and Avoiding Snake Oil)

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information on the internet. The search engine allows a user to look for web pages containing a given words or phrases (known as "keywords" or "keyterms") and retrieves a list of pages that contain that content. This list is often sorted with respect to some measure of relevance of the results.

Search engines use regularly updated indexes to operate quickly and efficiently. Unlike Web directories, which are maintained by human editors, search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human input. The algorithms analyze and compare various aspects of a site or page to determine relevance, including information not visible to the human visitors to the site, known as "meta data."

Meta data can include the site title, a brief description of the site, a list of keywords for the site, and other information contained in the source code of the site. Search engines often compare this invisible meta data to the visible content on the site, making sure that the meta data accurately reflects the true content of the site.

"Indexing" refers to the process whereby search engines send out small programs (known as "robots" or "spiders") to analyze and document pages on the web. "Ranking" refers to the relative importance or relevance a search engine assigns to a site, based on its analysis of the site's content and meta information. Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are the lists that a search engine displays as the result of a search for a particular keyterm. The higher a page is ranked by a search engine in relevance for a particular keyterm, the higher it will appear on the SERP when that keyterm is sought on that particular search engine.

Search engine optimization is the process of making sure that none of the various aspects of your site are unknowingly working against being properly indexed and ranked by search engines, and ensuring the highest possible ranking for your site.