Affiliate Marketing [Part 7]
What Is Search Engine?
Copyright © Captain Adiari, M.D.
http://www.OnlineGain.net

"Content is the king of the web and Search Engines love to eat the web."

As food is to the body so is content (referring to the hypertext of a webpage) to the web. If you click Google Home Page and search for "Home Business," the following appears at the extreme right hand corner: Results 1 - 10 of about 465,000,000 for home business.

This means there are at least 465 million websites with keywords "home business" that are all struggling to appear on Google first page. However, only ten of these websites win the competition to appear in this first page of Google.

For appearing on first page, anybody browsing the web using Google for the keywords "home business" will more likely browse these first page websites. Most of us don't bother to check "next page."

What this means is that these ten websites get more traffic (visitors) than the others. In fact the farther down a website, the less likely it will be found by internet surfers. And more surfers (traffic), more chances of sales, hence, more money in your pocket.

Mathematically, if your keyword is "home business," the probability that your website will appear on Google front page is approximately 2.2 billionth. That is, indeed, a tight competition! Isn't it?

Why this? What controls this appearance of websites? How can a website manage to appear on first pages of Google, Yahoo? etc. The "why," "what," and "how" are answered by your knowledge of Search Engines.

You cannot run a successful internet business without at least a basic knowledge of Search Engine Optimization and Keyword Research. Here in this article, you will be introduced to basic knowledge of what search engines means. Remember, we've been dealing with basic knowledge of the internet in this series titled: Affiliate Marketing. Relax and enjoy this Part 7 on "What is Search Engine?"

Search Engines - what are they?
If there is any knowledge so vital for a successful internet marketing it is search engine and how to utilize them for your benefit, usually refer to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Remember that the internet is a system of computers that communicate with each other using special language called Protocol. Also recall that the World Wide Web (the Web, for short) on the other hand refers to a system of hypertext documents (called the web pages) written in web language called Format (e.g. the HTML or XHTML) and linked together. These web pages forming the web are linked to the internet by the web servers. Thus, the Web is an important component of the Internet (note that there other components of the Internet such as the Email, which utilizes somewhat different system).

Today there are millions of web pages stored in thousand of web servers around the world as more and more websites are built. These web pages contain myriad of information of various topics and titles stored. The question is how can you search out the information you need from amongst these millions of information stored in these million of web pages?

There are two ways to do this:

Firstly, to access each of the web pages you will need to know each of their IP address or URL. But how can an individual memorize all the IP addresses or URLs of all the documents he wants? It means you will need to have a book where you will store all the IP addresses or URLs of all the important web pages you need. What if you need hundred of thousands of such web pages as some corporations do?

For instance, if you want to read about the history of colonial system in Africa, you will need to know the URLs or IP addresses of the various websites that deal on this topic. How practicable can this be? Thus, this first option is not helpful.

Secondly, what if there is software that enables you to type in the keyword(s) of the information you need and by these key words the information you need is downloaded for you. For instance, to search for the history of colonial system in Africa, you can just type in colonial Africa in Google or Yahoo! and click "search," and the various websites dealing on the topic will download immediately for you.

This second option is quite practicable and it makes the internet browsing enjoyable and quite informative.

Definition of a Search Engine
Software has been developed as the internet continues to advance that can capture all the important words or keywords in the million of web pages on the internet and arranges them like the index found at the back of a textbook. If you want to get a particular word from a textbook, you look it up in the index at the back of the text book, and the index will be able to direct you to the specific page in the book and sometimes gives the meaning of the word or group of words you are searching for.

In the same vein, this software can search the millions of web pages, store the key words as index so that once anyone types in the words the search engines quickly look them up for you. This software is called search engine.

By definition, a search engine is a computer program or software that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of documents where the keywords were found.

Search engines are the key to finding specific information on the vast expanse of the World Wide Web. Without sophisticated search engines, it would be virtually impracticable to locate anything on the Web without knowing a specific URL or the IP address.

In summary, there are various forms of search engines, but they all perform three basic tasks:
>they search the Internet - or select pieces of the Internet - based on important keywords
>they keep an index of the words they find, and where they find them
>they allow users to look for words or combinations of words found in that index.

Enzamples of Search Engines:
AltaVista
Ask Jeeves
Google
Teoma
Vivísimo
Yahoo!

The first tool for searching the Internet, created in 1990, was called "Archie". It downloaded directory listings of all files located on public anonymous FTP servers; creating a searchable database of filenames. A year later "Gopher" was created. It indexed plain text documents. "Veronica" and "Jughead" came along to search Gopher's index systems. The first actual Web search engine was developed by Matthew Gray in 1993 and was called "Wandex". [SourceYahoo!® and Google™ are just two examples of search engines that have been created to meet the demand for quickly finding information.

Types of Search Engines
Basically there are three types of search engines:
>those that are powered by robots (called crawlers, ants or spiders)
>those that are powered by human submissions
>those that are a hybrid of the above two.

How Search Engines Function
Automated search engines are those that use automated software agents (called crawlers or spiders). The crawler visits a website, read the information on the website and follow the links that the site is connected to. The crawler returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is arranged and stored as an index.

The crawler will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which it does this is determined by the administrators of the search engine. The process by which the crawler, also called spider, is building its lists is called Web crawling.

Google.com is about the largest search engine. It began as an academic search engine but now diversified into all fields. Google makers built their initial system to use multiple spiders, usually three at one time. Each spider could keep about 300 connections to Web pages open at a time. At its peak performance, using four spiders, their system could crawl over 100 pages per second, generating around 600 kilobytes of data each second.

Human-powered search engines are the search engines that rely on humans to submit information, which is subsequently indexed and catalogued. Only information that is submitted is put into the index. Comparing with the automated search engines, human-powered search engines take time and considerable efforts and hence are limited on how much database that can be catalogued and stored and how quickly this can be achieved.

Why Different Results of Same Keywords for Different Search Engines
It's important to know that not all search engines deliver the same results.
First of all, different engines search different databases for the information you specify in your search query. Some databases are more sophisticated and more detailed than others.

Secondly, the structure and organization of search results varies, depending on the search engine you are using. Generally, the results at the top of the page are what the search engine interprets as the most relevant to your search. However, not all search engines measure relevancy in the same way. For example, with many search engines, a Web page will have a higher ranking in the list of results if your keywords appear many times throughout the Web page—in the title, near the beginning, or close together on the page.

Thus, when you say you are searching, surfing, or browsing the Internet or the Web, what you are simply doing is you are going through the database of the search engine you are using. This explains why you obtain different search results for the same keywords you search for in different search engines.

For instance, type in "internet business" in Yahoo! or Google and you won't get exactly same results. The reason is that Yahoo! database is not the same as Google database because of the differences in the way their spiders are configured by their makers to determine and store keywords.

Determination of importance of which result to return for the keywords being searched is made by what is referred to as the algorithm of the search engine. The algorithm is what the search engines use to determine the relevance of the information in the index to what the user is searching for. Not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

Food for Search Engines
"Content is the king of the web and Search Engines loves to eat the web."

"content is king"

You might have heard of such quotations. The richer the contents of the web pages of your website, the more easily for the website to be found on the web. Search engines love rich contents. They give preference to websites with unique contents. The higher your search engine rating, the higher the website appearance in the pages of search engines.

Two things are very important to search engine algorithm in determining which keyword to index:
>the frequency and location of keywords on a Web page
One of the characteristics that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a Web page. Those with higher frequency are usually considered more significant. With the advance in search engine technology, what is known as keyword stuffing, or spamdexing, which some use to cheat the search engines, can easily be traced and discouraged.

>the number of back-links
Another common element that algorithms analyze is the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By analyzing the number of links pointing back to the web page and how pages link to each other, a search engine can both determine what a page is about (if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page) and whether that page is considered "important" and deserving of a boost in ranking. Just as the technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated to ignore keyword stuffing, it is also becoming savvier to Web masters who build artificial links into their sites in order to build an artificial ranking.

Types of Backlinks
Basically, there are 2 types:
>One-way link
>Reciprocal link

Not all backlinks carry similar ranking on search engines. Search engines place more weight on one way links. A good one-way link is worth 10 reciprocal links. Don't forget this.

What are the one-way links and how do you build them? Can you still utilise reciprocal links to boost your sales? Stay in touch with this blog to get all the basic knowledge you need on SEO and Keyword Research.

(to be continued...)

About the Author:
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Adiari Captain is an expert on Proven Home Business. To find the best home based proven business ideas and opportunities so you can work at home visit:
http://www.OnlineGain.net
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