There are hundreds of search engines available today, but some are far more complex than others. This article will give you an overview of how some of the most popular ones work.
Lets start with a smaller engine: InfoSeek. They only index about 200 words of your web page, so its important to make sure that you have meta tags on your site, and that the most important things are listed first. The information you put in your meta tags will be used to display a description of your site, and most meta tags can contain about 200 characters of text. The keywords meta tag, however, can have up to 1,000 characters.
These simple rules are important to keep in mind for all search engines. The more important that the information is, the closer it has to be to the beginning of your meta tags or even the beginning of your sites content. Many search engines wont even touch your meta tags so it is important that you have the same information in your body that you have in your meta tags (although you obviously cannot simply enter lists and lists of key words as this would be detrimental to your sites content).
The AltaVista search engine will send Scooter, its spider, to...