Before you begin the task of optimizing your website for search engines it is important to have an understanding of how they work. It would be almost impossible to optimize a website and achieve top search engine rankings without having some idea as to how they work and what is a search engine is trying to do when it ranks a site.

Use of spiders - Search engines crawl the web, employing automated programs called spiders or bots. The hyperlink structure of the web allows these spiders to crawl an estimated 8-10 billion of the approximately 20 billion pages and documents that make up the World Wide Web.

In basic terms the search engine can only do using how your page looks & additional information about your site that it can collect using spiders. This additional information consists of what is basically a popularity contest. The more links that you have to your site the higher up the rankings you will be.

When a user comes to the search engine and makes a query, typically by giving keywords, the engine looks up the index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document's title and sometimes parts of the text.

To make the reading of the search results easier, the search engines ranks the results. Relevance is the key criteria in the ranking and the results are provided in descending order. This ranking is created by algorithms that are constantly monitoring relevance. Relevance can include the age of a document, the number of links to a document, and the keywords in the document.

Every single SEO project is different because no 2 businesses are exactly the same and need their own goals identified and strategy implemented. The Google search engine is the most widely used search engine, however you really need to include all the major search engines when developing your internet marketing strategy.

Now after the page is crawled, it is then indexed and stored in a large database. From here SE's rank/list your site for relevant search terms. Now this priority is decided by Page Rank also know as PR as well as your keywords and number of pages indexed. We will discuss each of them later. So your goal should be to get maximum of your pages crawled so that your site get's indexed faster.

Functions like bold and italics of your keywords will render better results in search engines. The inbound links in your website will ensure that you improve the way you do search engine optimizations, further it is important to note the fact that sitemaps are very effective to generate greater interior links to your site.

Choosing good and relevant keywords for you website is the most important aspect for getting your website well ranked. The other important aspect is to make sure that your website is content rich and relevant. Make sure that you do your research thoroughly before launching your new website. Last but not least, make sure that you update your website frequently with fresh and relevant content.