Search engines are like any company product. They are constantly being improved to better serve their customers, and to increase their effectiveness over their competition. Over the years most of the major search engines have improved their algorithms or how they look at web pages. Let’s take a look at some of these changes and how they can impact the ranking of your web site.

The whole idea about search is to find something or some kind of information. Now that the internet has been around for over 25 years (hard to believe), there are so many web pages out there that making the newest pages more important than the old pages only makes sense. Why would you want to read an article about current economic conditions that was 3 years old? Search engines take into account how often new content is added to your website, and uses that information as well as other criteria to determine your rank.

Search engines scour the internet using programs called “spiders”. Spiders walk, or search the web to record what is out there. One of the things these spiders look for is how many links there are to a particular page. The theory being, more links make it more important. When you type in a search for something the engine looks for that search phrase and then delivers those web pages that match your search and puts the ones with links higher in the rankings.

If you wrap up these two thing as well as other criteria, this all adds up to where a search engine places your web pages in a search. So the key is to have a lot of fresh original content and have a lot of links to your website.