Search Engines – What Do They Do?

Search engines drive the Internet. If you're going to grow your business online, you're probably going to depend on such search engines as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. These all serve to deliver a huge chunk of your customers and clients search request. A high placement in the search engine rankings or (SERP's) can drive tremendous growth.

You can leave those rankings to chance and hope for the best. Or you can use SEO, the practice of providing the best possible product for search engines. SEO is a huge field, with thousands of little details that come together to make a successful campaign.If you want to improve your search rankings and steer clear of trouble, this information is for you.

When you're learning SEO, it's hard to separate tricks from solid strategies. To understand how search engines work, you need to know why they exist.
Search engines deliver relevance. Relevance means visitors click on search results and are happy with what the search engine found for them. When that happens, visitors come back, traffic to the search engine rises, and the search engine companie's stock goes up.

For example, if you go to Google and type in Weather, You would expect to click on a result and find a site about Weather. If I click a result and instead find a website about Wether, I might not use Google again. Google wants to deliver the most useful websites relating to Weather because it's good for their business. Same for every other search engine on the Internet. Don't be fooled by scammers who offer to help you move up in the rankings. They tell you they can trick the search engines into giving you a high ranking, even if you don't deserve it.

These tricks might include adding thousands of links on hundreds of websites: duplicating pages on your site, buying or stealing content from other sites and using it on yours, or connecting you to linking networks where hundreds of sites exchange links.
Or when asked how they would improve your rankings, the con artist might just say, it's a secret. Regardless, these people are trying to get you to believe they can get you a top ranking for SEO even if you have no related content.

Using tricks like these may get you some initial success, but they cost money, and you risk getting penalized by the search engines. Penalties cause you to disappear from the rankings or will move your site down to obscurity without warning. That can get expensive.
 

How To Make Your Website Relevant

Search engines want to know which website is the most important for a particular concept. These concepts are represented by key phrases. Houston hotels, kids candy, bikes, and wedding dresses are all examples of key phrases. Search engines are hierarchical thinkers. After reading billions of pages of content by using little software programs called spiders, search engines determine the relevance of each of those pages for a key phrase based on a complex series of rules.

When you go to the search engine and type in a key phrase wedding dresses for example, the search engine picks the best matches by looking at the following in hierarchical, order:

1. A sites authority on the subject of wedding dresses, as demonstrated by the links from other sites about wedding dresses. Everything from other, relevant sites is a vote for the target sites authority.
2. Where their wedding dresses on the main focus of each site, as demonstrated by site structure.
3. Which pages on those sites almost dedicated to aiding dresses.
4. Whether those pages are more relevant than all the other pages in the search engines index.

All you'd have to do is get yourself to the top of each of those pyramids, and you're rich!
Well, maybe it's not that simple. Thousands or even millions of other sites are all vying for the same top spot. To really compete, you're going to need to know how webpages are built and how engines read them. If you know how search engines read sites, and you know how to build them, you can provide what search engines want: a structure that indicates what that page is really about.

Search engines on the keeper of ethics or laws. Strictly speaking, there is no ethical reason not to play games with them in an attempt to get a high-ranking. However, this is a lousy business plan.
Assuming that your business plan allows for growth over a period of years, it pays to practice whitehat SEO tactics, rely on content and natural link growth, with a little help here and there rather than tricks.

Blackhat SEO professionals try to find loopholes and clever ways to fool search engines into providing a high-ranking than a site might actually deserve within that search engines ranking system. They are not breaking any laws, or doing anything unethical. They are just balancing risk versus benefit: Blackhat SEO is very risky, but can provide a huge benefit. But it also nearly  the guarantees you'll get court at some point!

Search engines demand relevance, not tricks, and assuming you want your rankings to have a lifespan beyond a couple of months, you should give the search engines what they want. Although it takes longer, following the rules give you a more resilient online business.

Anyone guaranteeing you a number one spot in the search engines, offering to submit you to three thousand search engines, or contacting you out of the blue is proberly going to rip you off. Also beware of tools that promise instant SEO ranking improvement with little or no effort. As the old saying goes if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.