Understanding Search Engines

Search engines, such as Google, are highly complex implementations of software technology that have evolved into mega-businesses, and certainly Google is a colossus when it comes to providing access to the information you can find on the Internet.
Effective SEO requires a basic understanding of how the pieces of search engine technology fit together.

A search engine, such as Google, implements four basic mechanisms:

• Discovery, meaning finding web sites. This is accomplished using software that travels down web links, which is sometimes called a bot, webbot, or robot.

• Storage of links, page summaries, and related information. Google calls the systems used for this purpose its index servers.

• Ranking, used to order stored pages by how important they are. Google uses a complex mechanism called PageRank to accomplish this task.

• Ranking, used to order stored pages by how important they are. Google uses a complex mechanism called PageRank to accomplish this task.

Discovery, Storage, Ranking, and Return (DSRR) are all important to SEO. In particular, you'll need to have a basic grasp of Discovery and Ranking in order to be effective with SEO implementationso these mechanisms are explained in greater detail later in this article (see "Using PageRank").