Search engines are a very common part of the Internet and have become a popular way for people to find information they are looking for. For business owners, learning search engine techniques can help to increase the number of customers visiting a website and generate more revenue. While at first some of these methods may seem laborious and time consuming, once mastered they are quick and easy to use.
When a person types keywords into a search engine, the software searches its pre-defined database for information matching those keywords. The information is then displayed on a page, known as a Search Engine Results Page or SERP. The SERP is a list of webpages that have been ranked according to their relevance to the query and the underlying search engine algorithms.
Each search engine has its own algorithm that weighs several complex elements in order to sort the pages listed on the SERP according to their ranking. This means that while one website might appear to rank higher on Google than on Yahoo!, the actual reasons for this are likely due to many complex factors that are hidden from the public.
Search engine software also contains various features that allow the user to refine and extend the search terms entered. This can be done in two ways: by truncating words and using Boolean operators. By truncating words, the search engine will only look for the whole word rather than the individual parts. The most commonly used symbol for truncating is the asterisk, but the search engine software may support other symbols. By using the boolean operators AND, OR and NOT, the user can narrow the search terms and reduce the amount of irrelevant information returned.
A search engine that supports Boolean search also supports proximity searching where the engine looks for words that are close together or within a specified distance from each other. This can be very useful in finding specific and obscure pieces of information.
Another way to help search engines is by placing phrases in quotation marks, which tells the engine to only display pages that contain those phrases exactly as they are typed. This is a good way to avoid pages that may have the same name as yours, or to prevent the search engine from trying to match a sequence of words with other phrases that might not be related to what you are actually looking for.
The last method of search engine techniques is to use capital letters when searching. This tells the search engine to ignore words that are only written in lower case, which is especially useful if you are searching for proper nouns such as names or locations. Alternatively, some search engines will ignore words that are only written in capitals because this is considered a spamdexing tactic. Gimmicks that less reputable SEO firms use to try to boost their clients’ rankings will often only work for a short period before the search engine software becomes wise to the tactic and drops the site from the rankings.