Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web Site

Chapter 2. How Search Engines Work

You type a few words into Google, and you get a screen full of highly relevant results in seconds. But how did it happen? How does a search engine find the right pages? You have learned that search engines return both organic and paid results, and we repeat a figure shown in Chapter 1, “Why Search Marketing Is Important … and Difficult,” as Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1. Types of search results. The Google search results page clearly separates paid from organic results; other search engines combine them.

In this chapter, we examine exactly how a search engine works, showing both what happens at the time a searcher enters ...