Search Engine Basics

As a business owner there’s nothing worse than wasting your hard earned dollars. Many small business owners fail the first time they build their website. We get the calls every month – it goes like this:

We Have a website but:

• We can’t update it
• The search engines don’t know it exists
• Our web developer disappeared and we have to start over

Before you start to build or rebuild your website you must understand how to build a business website that works. Our focus is to help you build a website that will show up in search results, not just an online brochure.

For your site to be effective it must:

• Include the information your potential customers are looking for
• Be optimized for search engines
• Be easy for you to update

The Goal is to Get Found
Our ultimate goal with your small business website is very simple. When a consumer goes to a search engine and searches for the products and services you offer we want your website to show up in the search results.

Information on Your Website
The foundation of an effective website is information, content. And the content that search engines read and use to evaluate a webpage is text. Here’s a simplified explanation of how a search engine finds a website and determines what the site is about.

Search Engines Finding Sites
Search engines have two sides to them. The side you see is the website where you type in what you are searching for and see a list of web pages to choose from. But did you ever wonder how a search engine finds all those web pages? Every search engine has automated programs commonly called robots that seek out new websites.

There are two basic ways a search engines finds a new site. Following a link from another site or having a link submitted to the search engine directly. The most common and most beneficial way for a search engine to find your site is for the search engine to find a link on an existing site and follow that link.

Imagine a search engine robot is reading through this site netbuilders.com and there is an article about another site Workout America.  The search engine robot makes a note of the link (Technically called a URL). Later that search engine robot visits Workout America and starts reading through its pages. This is where the phrase crawling the web came from.

Search Engines Crawl Before You Search
Let’s assume that a search engine robot found a link to your site and followed it there. We call them robots mainly because the process is automatic – these search engine robots automatically discover new website and then crawl through the pages reading and indexing the content.

As the search engine robot is reading through your site it makes a record of each page and the content on the page. As the process of indexing a page occurs the search engine keeps track of the important words it finds. Words that indicate what the page is about are tracked while common words like “if”, “the”, “is”, “and” are generally ignored.

Finding Relevant Information
The primary goal of any good search should be to deliver the most relevant results in response to your searches. The first step for you to make sure your website is displayed to your potential customers is making sure that your small business website is packed with pages that describe exactly what your customers are looking for.

Writing for the Internet
Now that you understand how a search engine will find your website and how it determines what your website is about the next step is to learn how to write content that clearly communicates what your website is about. Step 2 of our Site Building series will walk you through how to write effectively for the Internet.

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