Gopi Krishan garhwal

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Understanding Search Engine's Behavior

What is a Search Engine?
Basic concept of search engine is to type a word or phrase into a search box, wait a few seconds and references will appear, and all we have to do is click through those pages to find what we want.But exactly the search engine has a back end which is a piece of software that uses applications to collect information about web pages. The information collected is usually key words or phrases, the information is then indexed and stored in a database. On, the front end, the software has a user interface where users enter a search term- a word or phrase.

Structure of a Search Engine:
         
This is a vitally important to succeeding with search engine optimization (seo).

Query Interface:
This is the page that users see when they navigate to a search engine to enter a search term. Today many search engines have added much more personalized content in an attempt for search engine marketing.

Crawlers, Spiders, and Robots:
These little creatures are programs that literally crawl around the web, cataloging data so that it can be searched, like this many SEO’s work in a team and view the search engine behavior by using the search engine characteristics.

Databases:
Every search engine contains or is connected to a system of databases, where data about each 
URL in the web is stored.

Search Algorithms:
Generally a search algorithm is a problem - solving procedure that takes a problem, evaluates a number of possible answers, and return the solution to that problem. There are several types of search algorithms, they are:-
        
List search
Tree search
SQL search
Informed search
Adversarial search
Constraint satisfaction search

Retrieval and Ranking: retrieval of data is a combination activity of the crawler (or spider or robot), the database, and the search algorithm. Those three elements work in concert to retrieve the word or phrase that a user enters into the search engine’s user interface
Ranking plays a large part in search engine optimization. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide the best results first. Different search engines use different ranking criteria, they are :-
          
Location : Location describes the location of keywords where the target keywords are placed at the
                  document.

Frequency :  Frequency describes that how many times a keyword appears in the document.
 
Links : Links describes that how many links are for that keywords in the form of Anchor Text(In/Outbound).

Click-troughs : How many clicks a key word collects.It can be see by using analytical tool such as Google Analytics. 

Thus, we see that two search engines that have evolved: one is predefined and hierarchically ordered keywords. The other is the system that generates an inverted index by analyzing texts it locates
Most search engines are commercial ventures supported by employing SEO’s which brings qualified traffic  from the search engine and provide search engine marketing by truly understanding what exactly is the search engine characteristics.
Characteristics of Search:
The characteristics of search refer to how users search the internet. This can be everything from the heuristics they use when creating a search term to the selection the user makes (and the way those selections are made) once the search results are returned. This means different search results are returned depending upon the query, even if using the same search engines.
Today many people search the internet for several purposes depending on what are their needs and what they want.
This wealth of search engine users is fertile ground SEO targeting. This ensures the SEO to understand the search engine characteristics for the search engine optimization.
By using the search engine behavior the SEO can know what the users need and what are their views about the results that are placed in front of them.

Some Major Search Engines:
             
The major search engines are:
                      
Excite-1993
Yahoo-1994
Web crawler-1994
 Lycos-1994
 Infoseek-1995
 AltaVista-1995
 Inktomi-1996
 AskJeeves-1997
 Google-1997
 MSN Search-1998
              
Search engines can be broken down into three different types-
                          
Primary search engines: a primary search engine is the most often used search engines. Ex: yahoo, Google and MSN are primary or major search engines. These will generate the majority of the traffic to the web site and primary focus of SEO as it is shows the search engine behavior. Additional features like e-mail, mapping, news and different entertainment applications are also available from most of the primary search engines. They provide better results which must be kept in search engine optimization.

Secondary search engines: they are targeted at smaller, more specific audiences, although the search engine’s content itself is general. They don’t generate as much traffic as the primary search engines, but they are useful for regional and more narrowly focused searches. Ex: Lycos, LookSmart, Miva, Ask.com, and Espotting. These are just like primary search engines, will vary in the way they rank search results. Some will rely more heavily upon keywords, whereas others will rely on reciprocal links. This should be included in any SEO plan. Though they don’t generate much traffic as primary search engines but they generate valuable traffic that should not be overlooked.

Targeted search engines: these search engines sometimes called topical search engines are the most specific of them all. These are very narrowly focused to a general topic, like medicine, travel sports or some other topic. Here ranking criteria will vary from one to another. Ex: CitySearch, Yahoo! Travel, and MusicSearch. This is helpful for SEO for specific and much more narrowly focused topic which they want. They can use it for more specific search.


Putting search engines to work:
             
A search engine works in the following order:

Web Crawling
Indexing
Searching
                
All search engines go by the basic process. But different search engine use different methodologies and are bound to display different results depending on which search engine is used.
         1) The searcher types a query into a search engine.
         2) Search engine software quickly sorts through literally millions of pages in its database to find  
              matches to this query.
         3) The search engines result are ranked in order of relevancy.     
Search engines work by strong information about many web pages, these pages are retrieved by a web crawler. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed in a database for use in later queries. When a user enters a query into a search engine, the engine examines its index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages. These results are stored by using different methods by different search engines and are ranked accordingly.

This is the vital step in search engine optimization, as the search engine behavior is concerned it helps to know the view placed in front of them.
For the SEO this is the important part as through this they can bring great traffic to the user if search engine works properly and efficiently.
In this search engine when a user enters a query then the search engine characteristics could be well understood.
So now a days the big ventures are employing into search engines optimization and going for search engine marketing which will help their sites grow and their business also.
  
Elements Needed For SEO  

Search engine optimization is essentially the science of designing your web site to maximize your search engine rankings. This means that all of the elements of your web site are created with the goal of obtaining high search engine rankings.

Those elements include:

1.Entry and exit pages
2. Page titles
3. Site content
4. Graphics
5. Web site structure

In addition to these elements, however, you also have to consider things like keywords,links, HTML and meta-tagging. Even after you have all the elements of your page optimized for search-engine friendliness, there are other things to consider. For example, you can have all the right design elements included in your web pages and still have a relatively low search engine ranking. Factors such as advertising campaigns and update frequencies also affect your SEO efforts.
 
All of this means that you should understand that the concept of search engine optimization is not based on any single element. Instead, search engine optimization is based on a vast number of elements and strategies. And it’s an ongoing process that doesn’t end once your web site is live.

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