Understanding a bit more about how search engines work will help you understand how SEO affects your business. While not all search engines function the same, and how each engine works is a trade secret, here are a few basics to clear up the mystery.

   Search engines work by indexing the URL and the content on each site. This is accomplished by web crawlers, bots, or spiders. These programs crawl or fetch the content on the site, and index that to words commonly used on the page and words commonly searched for. This includes links, which can lead to new pages, discovering that pages are closed, or even that certain links are invalid. Broken links are discarded from the index and working sites are added.

    Most web pages are static, which uses languages such as HTML and CSS to create them. Those pages are most easily indexed by search engine crawlers. Dynamic pages, like those created in flash, are not so easily indexed, so using some sort of CSS or HTML on your site is a great idea, even if you wish for your user to have the dynamic experience.

    When a user enters a keyword into a search engine, the crawlers immediately go to work. The web crawlers list the most relevant sites based on page rank, link relevance, and several other factors. The pages with the best combined scores appear at the top of the list and the relevance goes down from there.

    Your SEO consultant with Flatiron SEO will be able to help you design a site that ranks high on most, if not all, search engines. Your specialist will be able to tell you where your site is weak, what its strengths are, how to improve it, and how to maintain those higher rankings. Through various classes, extensive research, and industry connections, your specialist knows what is current, what is no longer used, and what the upcoming rankings fads are. They know what advice is solid, what is bad, and how to avoid being penalized. Above all, your SEO specialist will be able to help you stay on top of your ranking and keep it in the desired range; they help you spot problems before they become problems.