Search Engines
A Search Engine is most probably the first page a user opens when he/she starts using the internet. A Search Engine is a tool that lets you find the information you are looking for among tons of websites present on the internet.
Here i'll give you some brief information on how search engines work.
The portion of the search engine you see in your browser is just an interface that lets you type search keywords and see results. The actual working of the serach engines is invisible to the user and happens backdoor on the servers of the search engines.
Search Engines's invisible part is always working. It goes through the internet looking for webpages, images, videos etc. This process is called Crawling.
During crawling, search engines find a lot of information contained on webpages around the internet. It then saves the required information on its databases. This process is called indexing.
When you search some thing in a web search engine, it looks at the indexed page in its databases to find matches and not the actual websites. That's how it is able to return results so quickly. This means that if you make a change in your website, that change will only be updated with in the search engine's database when it crawls your website again.
How often a search engines crawls your site is determined by the search engine itself. You can't force a search engines like google for example, to visit yousite everyday or twice a day, but if you want a search engine to visit you site more often try updating you content more often and see if this has any advantage.
Rankings
This is the most important part from the webmaster's point of view. Search Engines list pages according to their rank, determined by some algorithm. These rankings are very important to you if you are a website owner.
When people find something through a search engine, they usually scan the first 10-20 results displayed and will not go beyond that, unless they don't find what they are looking for. This means that you will have a better chance of some one finding your site, if you are in the top listings.
To assign a rank to a page, search engines use a number of ways such as, checking how many sites link to the particular page, how many people actually click the page after being showed as a search result, checking the content of the page and many other.
The most useful way of getting better ranking is to achive a large number of inbound links(links that point in to you site from other sites). A way of achieving this, is to provide good content on your site, so that more people will find it interesting and will therefore link to you site. Please see writing content for more information on content writing.
Related :
Search engine optimization
Getting visitors
Speeding up your web pages.
Writing Content
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