While at the surface level, search engines may be operating the same way they have for years, underneath the surface things are constantly in a state of flux. Search engine operations matter most on two totally different planes. Most individuals are interested in search engines as a means to find answers or locate information. The rest of the online community wants to be ranked highly in search engines as a means to support their online ventures.

Search Engine Users

The majority of people are rather clueless about how search engines work. They visit Google or Ask.com, type in their keywords or question and browse through the results. These searchers quickly find what they are looking for or change search terms until they do. They are completely unaware of the games and systems working behind the user-friendly interface.

Search Engine Behavior

A search engine works in a rather complicated way that can fortunately be summarized rather simply. Behind the scenes, the search engine, Google for example, will go out and search websites. The programs that do the searching record certain things like important keywords on each page, titles, links to and from the page, and content the page contains. Different search engines look for and record different things. Then, after searching out all of this information, it is stored away for use later. Of course, the searching is a continuous process as websites are constantly added and updated.

When a user types in a keyword or phrase, the search engine program goes back through all of the stored files looking for that keyword. It presents results sorted by how useful the program believes a website will be to the user based on up to 150 different criteria. Obviously, the more specific a search, the better results will be. With constant updates and new websites, rankings are constantly changing. Of course the search engines are always updating their programs as well to be sure results are highly relevant and useful to searchers. If not, they will lose business.

The Game of Internet Marketing

Individuals who work behind the scenes of the internet build websites and do what they can to generate traffic in the form of internet visitors. It has been shown time and time again that the best way to get traffic is to rank highly in the search engines, primarily Google as it is the number one search engine and has been for years. It seems as though it would be simple to rank highly in the engines, but unfortunately for marketers, and fortunately for searchers, this is not the case. Instead, most internet businessmen spend a great deal of time and money playing games with search engines.

Search engines want websites that give searchers what they want. Webmasters want visitors to want what is on their website. As search engines are the authority online, webmasters must fall in line and give the engines what they want if a website is going to be ranked highly. This is good news for searchers, but the problem is, nobody is 100% sure what a search engine wants.

Google, for instance, has around 150 different criteria it categorizes for every website. Some are well-known such as the importance of incoming links, keyword saturation, keyword ratios, and the amount of unique content on a page. Unfortunately, the weight each of these items bears on evaluation as well as the other items of interest is up for continuous debate.

Many webmasters practice search engine optimization for their own websites or offer the service to others. Of course, only the individuals who write the programs for search engines know what they are looking for, so everyone else is either guessing or working based on previous trial and error. If a website did well in the past, you must keep on doing the same things changing variables only one at a time to be sure you have as much control over your results as possible.

Search Engines Fight Back

Search engines are definitely onto the ploys of internet marketers. Employees of the search engine scan the same forums and blogs as marketers and even contribute to discussions occasionally. Search engine codes and programs are constantly evolving and frequently a webmaster will have a good feel for what to do with a website only to have the rules of the game changed. And of course, search engines don’t come with a rule book, so there is only one way to find out what the new game is – trial and error.