How Search Engines Function

While directories index websites, search engines index pages. They take into account not only the homepage, but also all (or nearly all) other pages. Their goal is to collect as many addresses as possible.

Here is what happens when your website has been submitted:

1. A robot checks that the page whose URL has been submitted is indeed accessible.
   
   
2. The page is then analysed by a software program that retrieves all the links.
   
   
3. The pages are then indexed and a program builds up a dictionary of keywords from these pages.
   
   
To create this dictionary, the engine uses the keywords that are specified in the keywords tag (more about this in the workshops) of pages, but also extracts certain words from the content, the title and even the URL. Certain words (called stop words) which are not considered relevant - such as articles, conjunctions, interjections, etc. - are deleted.

A weight can be computed and associated with each word. It is this evaluation that will determine the ranking of the page in search results when a weighted word is used in a query's criteria. This weight is calculated via algorithms that engines keep secret. Note that this value usually depends on the number of times the word appears in the text and on where it is located. For instance, the same word is weighted higher when appearing in a title than in the page body.