In the previous Session we looked at Why Search Engines are Important. In this lesson we look at how Search Engines work.

Download a PDF version of this lesson (67k) How does a Search Engines work. This lesson is a sample from the manual.

Search Engine Page Result (SERP)

Figure 1: Google Search Engine Page Result (SERP)

Entering the “Keyword phrase” to the search engine
Returns 2 lists

• Sponsored links i.e. paid search (circled in Green above)
• Search engine results i.e. unpaid search results or organic results

Title

Enter the title that you wish to appear in Google in the Page Title

Figure 2: Relationship between web page Title and Google SERP

NB! The most important objective of the title is to encourage the user to choose your site from the 10 others on offer.

Therefore it should:

• Include your keywords or key phrase for the page that you are trying to promote.
• Be interesting or exciting to the user. It is a waste of time if you manage to get on the right page in Google and then the user doesn’t click through to your site.

Snippets

Google appears to extract the snippet in the following order:

If search phrase found in:	Exact match to meta description	Search words are spread in same sentence	Partial match
DMOZ	1	1	1
Meta Description	2	3	3
Text extract	3	2	2

[http://mcanerin.blogspot.com/2005/05/where-does-description-come-from-for.html]
We have the ability to exert some influence over all three of these sources. Getting the snippets to be exactly the way we want them can be a time consuming and drawn out exercise. The benefit of getting the snippet perfect versus the effort required, relative to the ease of a good title, must be closely scrutinised.

Target Page

If you examine the target URL in the example in Figure 1: Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP) above you will notice the following:

Organic Unpaid Results	Paid Results
>www.rustybrick.com/keyword-phrase-tool.php	www.rapidkeywords.com PPC-Tool-guide.com
NOT the home page	HOME PAGE
Every page in the site is a potential landing page and is the page that the user will use to form the first impression of our site.	Increased control over the landing page so we can make a good first impression.

Return to DotNetNuke session contents.

or Go on to the next step of 2 Steps to Search Engine Optimisation