With millions of weblogs and sites on the internet, ranking on top of search engines is a very tough task and the race to reach to top is very competitive. Optimizing a site for search engine in my opinion is an art and it is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO in short. Many site owners are not aware of SEO, they think making and designing a site and publishing it on the internet is all they have to do, but the fact is if a site can not rank on first few pages of search result for certain keywords and without any web traffic, the site is similar to not existence, because nobody can find it.

Therefore it is very important to optimize site to gain higher organic ranking on major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing in order to offer product or service to site visitors. Although some people prefer to do SEO by themselves, but it is quite technical job, and you should know what you are doing, otherwise you can make things worse.

So, for business owners who provide their product or service through web, it is essential to hire a SEO company. Firstinsearch.com is an Arizona SEO company offering many services such as SEO, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), web design, and Social Media Optimization. SEM is a term that is used to market a site through Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. If you are located in Arizona state and looking for a Phoenix SEO consultant, you can contact Firstinsearch.com to get more information.

After the invention of internet and web, there have been revolutionary introductions to this area of information technology such as HTML & scripting languages. But what made the internet and web upside down? Surely it is this company called Google. Today, having a net worth of $200 billion, it continues to make drastic changes of people that use internet and the web. What made this fortune for Google? Yes, this is a very interesting question which has an answer that can be written through a whole book. The short answer is: Google’s Page Ranking algorithm.

What is Page Ranking? If you have ever installed Google toolbar, you may observer an indicator saying “PageRank”. This is the indicator which shows the numerical weight of the popularity (linkage, to be precise) of the page you are viewing. Let’s have a brief look at the logic behind PageRank.

First of all, PageRank is a registered trademark for Google and patented for Sanford University. This is due to the fact that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google developed the algorithm at Sanford University. Basically the fuel for page ranking is the vast link structure of World Wide Web. Using this linking structure, individual pages are given a value and based on the individual page’s value; they are listed in the search results. Highly valued pages will be displayed among the top search results. So, now you may have an understanding why people are so much bothered and competitive about getting a high value for PageRank. Assume there are two pages of X and Y and there is a link from page X to page Y. For Google this is a vote between X and Y pages, from page X for page Y. When page Y is ranked, number of votes plays the main role. But that is not the only factor used for PageRank. The existing page rank of the page which made the vote is also highly considered for ranking of the page which received the vote. The integrity of Google results makes the result listing extremely useful. Although Google display their advertisements next to the search results, they do not sell placement within the search results.

If you are a computer user who access web for various needs, you SHOULD have used search engines for finding information you are looking for. Some of the search engines such as Google and Yahoo have almost become household names. If you use search engines for day-to-day work, isn’t it worth to see how they really work and deliver what you are looking for within seconds time?

Usually a search engine works in three steps. First two steps are not visible to the end user but they are vital for the accuracy and the efficiency of the search engine. An end user interacts only with the final steps of the process.

The first step is called “Web crawling”. There are several names for this step including web spider, web robot, bots etc. Most of websites especially search engines use web crawling for maintaining up-to-date data. Web crawlers are either software programs or automated scripts that browsers web in a methodical manner. Then they pass whatever the information they are supposed to pass to a central server or a database. These web crawler software or scripts can be configured to look for specific things such as web page titles, to where these web pages are linked and how many times they have been linked. This is vital information for techniques such as “Page Ranks” in Google.

The next step is called “Indexing”. Once web crawlers pass collected information to a central location, index mechanism collect, parse and store this data in an effective manner. This is done for making the web searches fast. That’s why your results are returned with a fraction of a second time. Otherwise, just imagine if these search engines search for your information through the web online (like “Windows Search” searches for a file taking minutes), how long will you have to wait in front of the computer for results? Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! do make online documents, media content and graphics searchable through the search engine in an instant by using indexes.

The final step is “Searching”. This is where you and I interact with the search Engine. Searching is entering queries in various forms which are entered by the end user to satisfy their needs. Then the search engine looks for the matching patterns in its index and displays the results in search engine’s results page. Now, this is how your favorite search engine works!