Search Engine Optimization Book

Chapter

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SEO BOOK

Brief History of the Web

The web has became a direct marketers dream. In its infancy the web was based around the core idea of sharing knowledge for free. The closer your ideas are in some way aligned with this idea the easier it will be to promote your site.

The Goal of a Search Engine

Search Engine Relevancy:

Many people think search engines have a hidden agenda, or that they just do not like them. This simply is not true. The goal of the search engine is to provide high quality content to people searching the internet.

Search engines with the broadest distribution network sell the most advertising

space. As I write this, Yahoo! and Google are considered the search engines with

the best relevancy. Their technologies power the bulk of web search.

The Problem Listing a New Site:

The biggest problem new web sites have is that search engines have no idea they exist.

Even when a search engine finds a new document it has a hard time determining its quality. Search engines rely on links to help determine the quality of a document.

Parts of a Search Engine:

While there are different ways to organize web content, every crawling search engine has the same basic parts. Each consists of:

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a crawler

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an index (or catalog)

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and a search interface

Crawler (or Spider):

The crawler does just what its name implies. It scours the web following links, updating pages, and adding new pages when it comes across them. Each search engine has periods of deep crawling and periods of shallow crawling. Rapidly changing or highly important documents are more likely to get crawled frequently.

The frequency of crawl has no effect on search relevancy; it simply helps the search engines keep fresh content in their index. The best benefit of having a frequently

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