Making Friends with the Search Engines

This report will explore the current trends in Search Engine Marketing and give practical ideas on how website owners can better apply SEM to their own businesses.

Every website owner wishes to be great friends with the major search engines. Developing a good relationship with the search engines is a lot like developing a quality friendship in real life with real people. If you are genuine, interesting and reliable, you’ll make lifelong friends. The same is true of search engines.

The interesting thing about search engines is that they can help you make more and more friends every day – if you manage your relationship with them carefully.

Search engines use automated scripts, better known as robots or bots for short, that go out to find and index content on the web. Because the bots detect new links and signal the search engines that they’ve found something new to index, the engine’s knowledge of the web grows out like a spider web.

Because of this, the search engine bots are even called spiders and the process of indexing new pages is then called spidering.

The search engines, each with their own set of rules, decides how to serve up the pages that they have indexed. Initially these rules were quite simple, but that soon changed.

You’ve probably heard the term SEO which is the abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization.

Keyword Stuffing Many years ago some smart marketers realized that you could literally optimize your website pages by repeating keyword search phrases over and over in the text and within the tags of the page. (More on tags later.)

By repeating the word a lot, it tricked the search engine spiders into thinking there was a lot of information to be found about that phrase on that page (whether there was indeed any at all). So the more you used the phrase, the higher you could rise in the search engines for that phrase – at least that was the theory.

This ultra simplistic manipulation tactic made the search engines an easy target.
Fortunately the search engine engineers soon recognized this and changed their system so that this keyword stuffing (is: search engine spamming) wouldn’t be valuable anymore.

From then on the search engine marketers and the search engines have been engaged in a sword fight of sorts. One side learns how to optimize for the current search engine system and the other ‘jabs and parries’ and puts a stop to it and it starts again.

Alright, enough of the reader’s digest version of search engine history. If you want to learn more about the emergence of search engines as a major power on the web you can find some good resources at:

Let’s move on to define some important terms and begin to understand more about how it is possible to make friends with the search engines.

Making Friends with the Search Engines

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