It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of your prospective customers. That is why it is important to know just how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.   

This is how it works, there are basically two types of search engines. The first search engine use robots, called spiders or crawlers.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index the entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system.

Spider crawls a web site, then reads the content on the actual site, the site's Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all the information it just collected, to a central depository, where the data is indexed. They will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a few pages, so don't create a site with 400 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any updates by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like an indexed book, which 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 per day.

Examples are:  Google, AltaViwsta, Yahoo, MSN, Excite and Lycos.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is not searching the web, but actually searching through the index which it has created. 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, so it is not worth going the black hat route. 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.

It is as simple as that, and not half as complicated as one might think. :)