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The Importance of Search Engines

What's a search engine?
You know, those sites which you go online to search for information about a product or a service or anything. You type in a word or a few words and out comes the answers, hopefully with the top results all relevant. Think of them as little guys who goes around the Internet, checking the websites and content for you and then providing you with the results as and when you need it. Modern search engines are actually portals for finding all sorts of information on the web.

How they work?
We are not going into any details here but usually they consist of three main parts - search engine spiders(crawlers), database to store the indexed sites and the algorithm for results placement.
A simple explanation of their functions:
Spiders crawl the web and collect information(content) from websites.
Then it stores them into their database.
The Search Engine then "arranges" these collected information from the database in terms of importance depending on their algorithm when requested.

Why are Search Engine important?
Because there are billions of websites out there, covering millions and millions of subjects and topics, it is impossible for anyone to find their relevant sites without them. Seriously, the Internet is a mess. It's a messy unuseable collection of websites from different parts of the world without any proper way of arrangement or interlink at all. It's like searching for a needle in a haystack, blindfolded and handcuffed. Search Engines try to arrange or sort these websites in such a way that it becomes usable for the causal surfer. So why is this important to you as a webmaster? Because your site is in this haystack, and without search engines, nobody (else) can FIND your site only you. But what's the point of creating a website only have yourself as the visitor? Thus they have become the cornerstone for the Internet. Without Search Engines, surfers will be lost.

Search engines drive traffic to your site. And not only just traffic, these traffic are targeted as well. What does targeted means? It simply means that your visitors are the ones looking for information related to your site. So if your site is about history books, what type of visitors do you want visiting your site? People looking for software? People looking for medical advice on headaches? Or would you prefer those looking for more information on history? Yes, search engine is indeed powerful. Targeted traffic is a webmaster's wet dream. Whether you are selling a service or a product, or whether you are providing information on something, you can't lose with targeted traffic.

Looking at the huge number of Search Engine users, some of whom are your potential visitors, it is kind of easy to persude you to realise the importance of working with Search Engines. Everyday billions of searches are done. If you can get top rankings in the search engines, you will be seeing a huge increase in the number of visitors to your site searching for your information.

Search Engines are like free advertisements. FREE as in really free. A search engine doesn't charge you anything for it to display the link to your site unlike those advertisements/banners you can find on other websites. Yes, free targeted traffic! Why not? And remember it being targeted. Your "ads" are relavant and your visitors are more interested in what you have to offer or sell or provide.

Okay Mr Search Engine Whore, you win, now what?
Your job as a webmaster is to HELP Search engines do their job, which is to deliver relevant information to their users. To do that, you have to make your site attractive to spiders by optimizing it for search engines and make it easier for them to find, index and tabulate. We call it Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Although practicing good SEO and getting the results in the Search Engines require some real work and effort(not to mention time), I believe that it is more than worth it. Practicing good SEO is all about baiting spiders to your site, making sure your site content is being collected correctly and getting the search engine to see that your content is relevant to a particular keyword and getting other websites to link to you. Nothing more than that.