Web crawling, indexing and searching combine in that order to obtain the most accurate results. Mass amounts of information on millions of web sites are stored and then retrieved relevant to the user's request. A web crawler is also known as a spider, it analyzes every link and indexes all information for faster retrieval.

Mata tags and even words from the webpage are studied to classify the webpage and its content. All these data are stored for future usage.

Companies such as Google store all or part of the source web page, while AltaVista stores every page word for word. The information stored and indexed is known as the cache, it allows for instant updating and keeps the searching filtered with ease. An important factor for a successful search engine is its ability to provide active and useable information with minimal to no linkrot. The cache also saves an archive of a removed source that can later be access by the user after the site is updated.

Search engines will examine keywords entered by the user and obtain a list of organized search results. Summaries may also accompany web links on the results page.

Many filters and specialized web crawlers create a proprietary method for analyzing web pages for results. While a keyword can be found a very large amount of websites not all sites are relevant to the users purpose and companies pride themselves on result relevancy.

The larger search engines strive on bringing back only relevant results. There are millions of WebPages that contain the keyword entered in the search field but not all the sites will have that relevant information. The search engines have used their web crawlers and indexing to filter out information that is useless and create their own method for analyzing a website for content.

Some search engines use page rankings to assist in their sifting. The search engines look at each individual page and determine through their meta tags, descriptions, keywords and content if the sites are relevant based on the key words in the search. The higher a site is ranked, the higher to the top of the results inventory it will be. The search engine sometimes uses other websites to help determine how highly a site should be ranked. If your page is linked to a higher page, it means that your page will have a higher rank in the search outcome.

Graham McKenzie is the content syndication coordinator for seorankings.co.za. That provides world class SEO Services to website owners

Tags: internet marketing, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, seo, search marketing