The first of these steps are the web crawlers or spiders, or for Google GoogleBot. These programs search the entire internet by following links. They basically jump from page to page and index everything that they see. As there are billions of web pages up at any given time, a web crawler cannot regularly visit the page to review any changes made to it, they pass by only once every one or two months. So, although it’s very important to keep your webpage updated, do not get upset if you don’t see the updates of your webpage affect your ranking right away.

It’s also very important to be aware of what web crawlers or spiders see on your website and are able to index. This is vital to your ranking. Primarily, the main thing that they see is content, or text. This means make sure that your website is full of useful information that has relevant keywords to help the crawlers index it better. Other things that web crawlers see are metatags and links, so have plenty of those, of course, with useful keywords. Keep in mind that crawlers cannot see flash movies, music, java scripts, images, and frames.

The following step to a search engines process to finding the results to searchers inquiries is indexing. What indexing is is basically as crawlers jump from page to page they collect all the data they read, and store it in large databases and organize them. They identify the major keywords, metatags, and links in each webpage and sort them. It’s very difficult however for a web crawler to know how to index and classify your website properly if it’s not well organized and doesn’t have the proper keywords in it. If you use proper SEO techniques you will be able to get the best benefits of web crawlers and indexing and therefore get a much higher ranking.

So, how do search engines get all that information to come up when an inquiry is made? When a request is made by a searcher into a search engine it’s processed. They words used are passed through the search engines database of indexes. Since most searches bring up millions of pages it then organizes all of the processed information and calculates it by reverence depending on the algorithm of the search engine itself.

An algorithm is a process of calculating reverence when organizing indexed web pages for an inquiry. The algorithm calculations are based on various things in a webpage such as keyword density, incoming and outgoing links, or metatags, in various orders of importance. For instance, with the new Google Caffeine Google will no longer use metatags as an algorithm, however Yahoo still uses them. This is why you get different results from different search-engines, as each has their own individual algorithm for reverence. Also, it’s important that you stay on top of news for major search-engines, as they often change their algorithms.

The final step to a search in a search-engine is when searchers see the final result, called retrieval. This is when the web crawlers have indexed all of the information in the databases, and the information has been processed and calculated using that specific search-engines algorithm. This is when the searcher sees the results of their inquiry in order by reverence.