This week we interviewed Danny Sullivan, Editor of Search Engine Watch, the most inclusive site on the Web dedicated to educating readers about how search engines work. Designers already know they need to make pages that work for both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Search engine design is recognizing that a search engine spider is like a third browser that sees pages in its own way. If you don't also consider this browser in your design, it may not be able to view your pages and index them properly. That means you may miss being found by the many people that use search engines.
Search engines send out spiders that make copies of the pages they find on the web.
These are stored in an index, a big book of web pages. When people search, search engine software flips through this book to find pages that seem to match what they are looking for. They typically look to see if the search words appear in the title, meta tags and beginning of documents they have indexed. Repetition of terms is another factor, and there are a wide number of other things involved in the mix. Make sure the terms they want to be found for appear in page titles, meta tags and in the HTML copy of their pages.