How Web Search Engines Work?
Search Engines are the key to find out the specific information on the vast area of World Wide Web. If there would be no search engine, it would have been virtually impossible to locate anything on the Web unless and until we know a specific URL.
Basically there are three types of search engines: Those that are powered by robots or crawlers or spiders and those that are powered by human submissions; and those that are hybrid of the two.
Crawler-based search engines like Google create their listings automatically. They crawl on the web, then people search through what they have found. If you change your web pages, this kind of search engines eventually finds these changes and that can affect how you are listed.
To perform Search Engine Optimization [SEO] on a web page, it is very necessary to understand first that how web crawlers, search engine robots or search engine spiders actually works. A web crawler is a program that is run by the search engine system which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical and automated manner. Web crawlers use a process called “crawling the web” or web crawling. They start with the web servers that have heavy traffic and most popular web pages.
First the search engine spider goes out to check the web pages. It finds your home page and reads the head section to look at title tags, keywords phrases and description tags, and Meta tags with robot instructions. After reading these things on your home page it then goes to your content page to read notes keywords/phrases used that were specified in keywords and description Meta tags of the head section of the page, notes headings used, notes alt tags descriptions and notes link titles. By this it finds links on the page and follows the links. When the spider finishes its World Wide check of web pages, it returns home carrying all the details about your website. When it returns home the information or details collected is indexed by the search engine.
Human powered search engines rely on humans to submit information that is subsequently indexed and catalogued. So it depends on humans for its listings. You submit a short description to the directory for your entire website or editors write one for sites they review. A search will look only for matches in the descriptions submitted. Changing your web pages has no effect on your listing. That means things which are useful for improving a listing with a search engine have actually nothing to do with improving a listing in a directory. The only difference is that a good website with a good content might be more likely to get reviewed for free than that of poor website.
In both the cases, when a query is fired on search engine to locate information, you are actually searching through the index that the search engine has created. One another important common elements that search engine algorithm analyze are the way that a web page links to the other pages in the web. By this, the search engine determines that what a page is about and whether that page is considered important and deserving of a boost in ranking.