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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 crawlers or spiders to index websites. When a search engine discovers your website, either through an incoming link or from a submission by you, it will send crawler to catalog all the pages on your site. These crawlers are completely automated. The crawler visits your site, reads the contents, titles, meta tags, links and will also follow links on your site. When it's finished, the crawler will return the information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed for quick access later. The crawler will index any of the sites you link to as well. Some search engines limit the number of pages per site that are indexed, so if you want everything indexed, keep your site small!

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.

Search engines that use crawlers: Google, AltaVista, Lycos and Excite.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.