Searching for Answers Courtesy of Web Site Journal , Copyright 1999 by Netscape. Web site owners will do anything to ensure their site is one of the first listed. This week we focus on the basics by interviewing Danny Sullivan, Editor of Search Engine Watch, the most inclusive site on the Web dedicated to educating readers about search engines.
Search engines send out electronic 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 and delivers the results in rank of relevance to the query. 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.