Most of your prospective customers will find your website through a search engine. Understanding how search engines work and how they find and present information is vital to your long term business success.

Search Engines use spiders, also called crawlers, 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 on the site. 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 site 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 like a program that creates a book of your site - 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.

Examples of search engines that use spiders: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When a web surfer asks a search engine to locate information on keywords, the search engine checks it's index and local copies of your site, it doesn't search the web. The reason for different rankings on different sites is because each search engine uses different algorithms to search its own depositories.

Search engines use a lot of different ways to determine how to rank a site, some use frequency and location of keywords, but most of them put a special emphasis on the anchor text of incoming links. By determining what words people use to link to your site, it then figures out what your site is about and which search terms to rank it highly for.

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