Last Wednesday, my class had Kevin Grinder, President of Digital Studios, come teach us about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In a nutshell, SEO is making ones website visible to work with search engines. By going through this process, a search engine will clearly pick-up your website, and allow web searchers find your site according to specific keywords or phrases that apply to your website.

The mose interesting thing that I took from Grinder’s visit was how search engines work. The first term he used was crawling. It is defined as when search engines send out “bots” to find new and updated pages to be indeed into the respective search engines. Bots are also called “spiders” or “crawlers.” The bot reads the pages and then brings that info back to the search engine to be indexed. He explained how your site will not be found by a search bot unless it is directly submitted or a link is made to your site from another site.

The next term described was Indexing which is the process the search engine takes to evaluate the pages that have been read. It is a massive index of all the words and their location on the pages are then processed for importance and relevance. Serving results are then what the search engine displays with the found  indexed information.

This is something I never knew. I know how to use a search engine, and could explain how it works-but never in such detail to terms or definitions. I then understood the importance of knowing how search engines work. A search engine is a business that is trying to function properly. Along with your company website etc. you are also trying to carry your business in a functional way. If SEO does not take place properly, a potential customer would not properly find your website or page when using a search engine because it would not be recognized by the correct keywords.