How Search Work

You see it and use it multiple times throughout the day, but do you know how it works?

Surprisingly, many webmasters severely lack knowledge about one of the most important aspects of the internet - the search engines! We all know they exist, we know people use them, and we know that they drive traffic to our websites. But few people actually carry an understanding about how they work. If you can educate yourself about the way search engines function, you'll be more capable of optimizing your site properly. Search engines send automated "bots" to "crawl" the web through hyperlinks.

Without external hyperlinks to your website, the bots really have no way of finding your website. It's still possible that they'll discover your site eventually, but without some kind of effort on your part, it may be unlikely. Only about half of the existing pages on the internet have been crawled by the search engines, if that gives you any indication of the importance of backlinks.

Once the bots crawl your website, it becomes indexed in a huge database along with all the other indexed pages on the internet.

There are literally billions of pages stored in this database. Yet, as you've probably noticed, it takes barely a second or two to get results after performing a search.

When searches are made, the engine quickly scans through relevant documents and provides results based on the most accurate possible matches.

Generally a match is determined by the presence of that particular keyword on the webpage. Thus, on-page optimization is extremely important. Google and the other search engines will provide differing results depending on whether you type the phrase as-is (purple umbrellas), in quotes ("purple umbrellas"), with the + symbol (purple + umbrellas), or other variations. After the SE has found matches for the search query, a special algorithm scans each of the results to determine relevance to the keyword phrase. Results are provided to the user in order from most relevant to least relevant. So what can you learn from this information? A few things:
1. Your page must be relevant to the search term (listing the keyword several times throughout the course of the website, on-site optimization)
2. You need external hyperlinks (backlinks) pointing to your website to act as a "gateway" for the bots to access your site. As far as relevance goes, Google and the other search engines take all of these into consideration:
a. On-site optimization
b. Age of the domain (the older the better)
c. Page Rank (PR)
d. Alexa ranking (the 'popularity' of your website based on the amount of traffic it gets)
e. Number of backlinks, particularly from high PR authority websites that are related to your website (if you have a blog about real estate, a high PR link from a real estate website will be more valuable than a high PR link from a website about dog grooming)
f. Linking structure of the website (easy navigation)
So looking at all of these factors, you can see why Amazon.com would take the #1 spot for "buy books" rather than your three-week-old Blogger blog with 4 backlinks.

The article comes from an ebook - SEO for Busy Marketers is an ebook which can be found here.

The Facebook history

Here is the short history of Facebook, the biggest social networking site from the planet. What begins as an online place for college students to know each other has been transformed into a global online phenomenon.

Facebook, or TheFaceBook as it was called at the beginning was launched in 4th of February, 2004.

Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard University student started the site as a way for his fellow students from Harvard to get to know each other. At that time, the site was opened only for certain students and it wasn’t perceived as a business even it has funds at disposal. Mark saw this website as an alternative to spend more wisely the time after school. Mark was still in the school when the site started to grow at an incredible rate. As to discuss the initial funders, they received money from individuals like Peter Theil, Accel Partners, Greylock partners and from the advertising deals with Microsoft and iTunes.

The students which were members started to recommend Facebook to other students and the fellows from other universities started to have possibility to join the site. Until 2006, Facebook was not open to the public.

After the site was live for a period, Mark brought for helping to grow the site Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. A fem months later, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped Harvard to concentrate on growing Facebook. Facebook, as we know it today was started in August 2005 when the company bought the domain Facebook.com with 200,000 USD from a company called About Face.

In 2006 we find Facebook facing a tremendous growth. Many more school, universities and businesses started to be part of the network. Starting with September 2006, anyone above 13 years old is eligible to have an account on Facebook. Being part of na network wasn’t a requirement anymore.

In March 2006 there were rumours about a potential acquisition of Facebook by Google. They made an offer for 750 million USD but the Facebook management dropped it because they thought of 2 billion USD.

Microsoft was also on the short list of potential acquisitors, but in the end they just bought 1,5% from shares and started a huge advertising contract with Facebook.

When things started to look tremendous, ConnectU, another Harvard based social networking site claimed that the founder of Facebook stole some of the codes from their software. In the end, the lawsuit was dropped and Facebook started to move forward.

The idea of community was at the base right from the beginning and it is also now, even if the
site is much, much bigger. All players, the developers, personal users and business users understood how important is to keep the spirit of community alive both for Facebook success and their own.

The Facebook team is very interested to make their community happy and that’s why they add new features all the time and if they identify new needs from customers, to fulfill them.This web 2.0 site is a great resource for your social media marketing efforts so include it in your marketing weapons.