Most Search Engines store more than just the word and URL. As an example the Search Engine might store the number of times that a certain word appears on a page. It might assign a weight to each entry, with increasing values assigned to words as they appear near the top of the document, in sub-headings, in links, in the META tags and also in the title of the page.

Each commercial Search Engine uses their own formula for assigning weight to the words in its index. This is one of the reasons that a search for the same word on different Search Engines will produce different lists, and the pages are presented in totally different orders.

In order for the search engine’s spiders to be able to build and maintain a list of useful words, they have to look through a lot of web pages. The spiders starting points are lists of heavily used servers and very popular pages.

The spider will start with a popular site, indexing the words on its pages and following every link found within the site. In this way, the spidering system quickly begins to travel, spreading out across the most widely used portions of the internet.

For online business owners it is important to understand the basics as to how search engines work. This enables you, as an online business owner, to take advantage of the traffic that only search engines can deliver to your website.