HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK
Search Engines consist of 3 parts
•Spider software- continuously searches the web looking for URL’s, text and links (the search engines cannot read text that is inside an image or flash [although they are getting better at it] etc.) They look specifically in the HTML header code for Title, Description and Keyword Tags, plus the Text on the page.
You an read the HTML code on virtually all web pages (although you obviously can't change it for security reasons). In Internet Explorer click on "view" and then "source", this will show you the HTML code that your browser uses to show you the page. At the top of the page will be a <head> symbol which shows the start of the Header code. Before you get to </head> (which closes the header) you should find <Title>, <Description> and a <Keyword> tags. The Search Engine uses these 3 pieces of information to try and work out what the page is about. Many developers fill these in on the home page only or cut and paste the same information onto all the pages on a site - the Search Engines will then think all of the pages contain the same information.
If you look at the search results:-
The top blue line will generally be the <Title> from the page that the Search Engine thinks is most relevant to the search, it gets this from the HTML code and will only display 62 characters (inc. spaces)
The next 2 black sentances will generally be the <Description> from that page and will show 153 characters (inc. spaces). In this case the terms that the searcher used (Fitted Kitchens London) are highlighted and you can see that they appear several times, telling the Search engine that this page is relevant to "Fitted Kitchens London".
As the Title and Description are shown in the results of a search, along with many other competing sites (pages), it is important to see them as an advert and they should be written to attract people to click through to your site rather than to any other in the Search Results.
Too often we see " Home" as the title of a page or the company name used throughout a site rather than just on the About Us page.
Every page should have different Title, Description and Keywords which tie in with the content written on the page. This then tells the Search Engine what the page is about and how relevant it is to people searching for those keywords.
It passes this information to Indexing software which analyses the pages with complex mathematical formula and scores the page for relevance against keywords or phrases, using the Title, Description and Keyword tags and the page text, plus a lot of other data which we won't cover here
The start process for good SEO results is for us to work with each client to determine the correct keywords that accurately describe your products and services - as seen by the people who are searching for them, therefore not using in-house jargon.
Good Keyword research is the bedrock of coming high up in the Search Engine rankings.
Query software(what you see on the Search Engine screen) presents the results – most relevant (highest score) pages first.