Search Engines
A search engine is a huge database containing information about Web pages from individual Websites.
Search engine companies own thousands of computers that use software known as spiders or robots (sometimes also referred to as bots) to grab Web pages and read the information stored in them. The search engine’s spiders don’t always grab all the information on each page of a Website, but they grab a significant amount of information to use complex algorithms – a calculation based on complex formulae – to index that information.
Search engine algorithms
Each search engine has its own algorithm, or method of indexing Websites and ranking them in order of relevance to given keywords. No-one knows exactly what any one search engine’s algorithm is. In fact each algorithm is an ever-changing process involving millions of sites and their ranking. Search engines try to make the ranking of sites in order of relevance to a particular search query as fair as possible.Ranking factors examples
Search engines take many factors into consideration when ranking Web pages. Some of these factors are:- Quantity of incoming links
- Quality of incoming links
- Age of the domain
- Link text
- Domain text
- Page name
- Meta tags
- Heading tags
- Alt Tags
- Page content
- PageRank (Google)
SEO & SEM
Each search engine has its own algorithm, and the importance of each ranking factor is weighted differently from search engine to search engine. That is why FLAME:Media use a mixture of SEO techniques and search engine marketing, to ensure each factor improves its relevance to a targeted keyword for better rankings in the search engines.FLAME:Media focuses its SEO and SEM efforts for clients on what are commonly referred to as the ‘Big Three’ search engines.