Designing web pages and promoting them are as different as chalk and cheese. Just because a web site has been built, does not mean that it will be promoted automatically. ‘Build it and they will come’ just won’t work. Like any product,a website needs to be promoted and promoted well to stand any likelihood of being ranked in the first page of a search engine. There are myriad ways to enhance website visibility and search engine Optimization ( SEO ) is one of them.

An important component of SEO is getting the pages to rank on search engines, so that search spiders ( an automated software ) can include them in their database and display the most relevant result, in response to a query being searched.

Search engine spiders index text on a web page, and they find web pages by Crawling links from one web page to another. If spiders are unable to access a web page, those pages will not rank.

How do search engines pull millions of web pages from their index and rank them in a fraction of a second ?

Pages are ranked on the basis of relevancy to the search term. But what is relevancy ? How do search engines determine the relevancy of a web page ?

Relevency is determined among other things by web page content. Its by far the single most important onpage factor affecting a web site's position in search engine's. The content is what visitors are going to read when they visit a web site. Not only visitors, but search engine spiders will read the same content and rank a site based on what they percieve to be relevent content. No matter how much content a site may have, its imp. To make sure that the content is understandable and readable.

Lets say your have a website dealing with old bicycle parts. As a website owner, you must make this phrase an essential part of web copy. When the crawler makes it way through the site, it records the number of times the keyphrase is used in the content . A spider uses a very complicated algorithm as its search fromula to percieve what seems relevent to it.

It also looks at keyphrases in the context of the web site – not just keyphrases, but also things like their placement ( where on the site the words appear ) , the alternative text that we put in for graphics, and the quantity and quality of backlinks to a site.

After looking at all these elements and many others ( Google considers about 200 such factors ), the crawler makes a determination about where in the great scheme of things web site belongs. The information is then stored in a database.

The algorithm checks the search query entered by the user with the data stored in the databse to determine which sites – of the billions of sites- are the best fit for the keyphrase the searcher used.