SEO Blog Post- Week 3 (Search Engines)

I was introduced to material this week concerning search engines, which are essentially programs that search documents for keywords and produce a list of documents where those same keywords can be accessed on the internet. Moreover, I am utilizing http://www.seocertification.org to learn more about the basics of search engines.

I believe that one of the most interesting things that I have discovered so far is that there are two broad areas to consider when introducing SEO, which are search engines and directories. Examples of search engines are Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. Currently, Google is the undeniable market leader when it comes to search engines. It is a crawler oriented search engine, and is easily one of the most recognizable names in the business world today. On the other hand, directories are web search tools that are edited by humans. An example of a directory is the Open Directory Project (Dmoz). Therefore, directories rely on human interaction, whereas search engines use tools like spiders to gather information for users.

One of the most important pieces of information I took away from reading about the basics of search engines was that any crawler based search engine must be made up of the following three elements:

1. Crawler or Spider
2. Index
3. Search Engine Software

In addition, I have read a lot about search engine spam, which is essentially the unethical attempt to earn a higher ranking on SERP. I would definitely recommend looking into what Google considers spam to be, as it is likely a safe bet to be universal across the industry if a market leader permits it or not. There are many forms of search engine spam, but here are a few of the most interesting that I have stumbled upon thus far:

• Unrelated Keywords
• Redirects
• Tiny Text
• Cloaking
• Hidden Links

I look forward to learning more about search engines in the upcoming weeks and sharing that information routinely.