Search engines work by recognizing patterns of words and trying to understand the content and relevance of webpages.

Search engines work on a pre-defined set of rules or algorithms. Most search engines have absolutely no manual human controls since they are required to analyze and organise such a massive amount of information which is constantly changing. Search engines tend to be as intelligent as the computer programs that have been developed by humans to do the job.

Search engines are basically a computer program that works by :

1. Downloading website pages from the the internet with a crawler
2. Index the content on that page and store it in a massive database
3. Calculate the relevancy of webpages against associated keywords

A crawler is a computer program whose role is to scour the internet and download pages of websites. The crawling program starts at known popular websites and follows links from one page to another.  Therefore, to get your website indexed in the search engines it has to have links from other websites, otherwise the crawler cannot find it.

After download the page it adds the page to the index. The index works like a database that is used for storing and future retrieval actions. The entire text of a web page is stored, it then also looks at the words and combinations of words(known as keywords) used on the page and associates the page to those keywords. Keywords are what people use in search engines to find content. For example if I wanted to buy blue widgets I would probably type into the search engine “buy blue widget”. It goes without saying then that if you want to rank well with a specific keyword then it definitely needs to used on the page.

Ok, so at this stage your web page is in the database and has been associated to a variety of keywords. Now the search engine needs to work out which one to show first, second, third etc. The goal of a search engine is to provide the searcher with a page that exactly meets the need of the search. If they can do that effectively every time you will return to their search engine. If they don’t you get frustrated and go somewhere else to solve your problem.

The search engine does this by calculating weight or revelancy to each web page. This is done by a very complicated algorithm that takes into account many aspects.

Since most of the content on the internet is changing every minute, the task of indexing and crawling is a continuous process. The spiders, indexing and relevancy programs are used to make sure that the search engine returns the most relevant results for any given search. Algorithms used for calculating relevancy differ from one search engine to another so success in one search engine doesn’t guarantee success in others.

Keywords play a vital role in SEO techniques since the website can be optimized in the best possible manner through the use of keywords that have been selected. Therefore, selection of the right kind of keyword is important for the success of your search engine optimization efforts. If you want to make sure that your webpage ranks higher then it is important to make sure that it is keyword-rich.

The positioning of the keywords on the webpage can improve relevancy to the search word. It is important to understand that search engines are not capable enough to read. They simply detect patterns of words and letter to execute matching work as best as they can possible do.