Search engines are designed to provide people with the right information based on certain criteria. These criteria may be quality or relevance. They also take into account user behavior in order to make money and collect data about searchers. In order to rank higher in a search engine result page (SERP) a business must use a variety of techniques and tactics to improve its performance. Some of these are specialized for specific types of searches while others are useful to anyone using a search engine.

The basic way a search engine works is by creating an index of all the information that exists on the Web. The search engine then uses its technology to find pages that contain the desired keyword.

This is a huge task and requires complex algorithms to determine what a site should rank for a given keyword. These algorithms are closely guarded secrets and constantly under revision. Because of this a page’s ranking on Yahoo! does not necessarily mean it will rank high on Google.

A search engine can do many things in order to determine the relevance of a page and its content, but the most important is how a web site is structured. Search engine optimization involves the use of keywords, truncation and proximity to help a searcher refine their search.

For example, if a word has multiple endings, a search engine can use the truncation technique to return results that include any of the different forms. Truncation is the use of a special symbol, usually an asterisk (*), to search for variations in the base word.

Another helpful technique is to place a phrase inside quotation marks. This tells a search engine that you want to search for exactly that phrase. For example, searching for “sugar cookies” will limit your results to recipes that actually mention the term sugar. You can also use the search operator AND to make sure all of your search words appear in your search results. This limits your search results but can be very effective.

A search engine can also analyze how a page is linked to other Web pages in order to understand the relevance of that page and its content. This is known as link analysis and is used to determine a page’s ranking. A page with a lot of links from other sites is seen as a more valuable resource and will be ranked higher than a page that has few links. However, there is a problem with link analysis: the number of links does not always accurately reflect the value of a page and can be affected by the quality of those links. This problem is known as linkrot and can be a significant problem for a search engine. In order to correct this, the truncation and proximity techniques can be used in conjunction with link analysis to improve the accuracy of a search engine’s rankings. This will improve the relevance of a search engine’s results and save users time by displaying only those results that are relevant to their needs.