Definition: Search engine

As part of our Beginners Series we are including this basic definition of Search Engine:

Definition Search Engine:

A search engine is a program designed to help find files stored on a computer, for example a public server on the World Wide Web, or one's own computer

Google, Yahoo and Bing are examples of Search Engines that people are most familiar with.

Search Engines are critical to Website owners as that is where they get a lot of traffic (people visiting their Website on the Internet) to their websites from without having to pay for it

Definition Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization – SEO – is the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web pages for search engines. It is the process of optimizing the factors on a  website page – the factors that a search engine looks for to determine the content, relevancy and authority of a Website page on any given subject.

On Page SEO examples include proper Meta Tags like the title Tag and the Definition Tag, Having a main keyword phrase that relates to the subject matter of the page and including it in the page title and in headings in the text, etc.

Off Page SEO examples include getting people to link to your Website and pages with "Anchor Text" that contain the keywords that your page is focused on.

Definition Search Engine Results Page

Search Engines Results Pages, or SERPS, refer to the page of websites that come up when a person enters a search term in a search engine like Google.

It is commonly understood that being on the first page of the SERPS is Required if you want to get more then a fraction of 1% of the traffic for any search term. This is also called being "Before the fold" meaning before the fold in the virtual page.

The higher up the Serp page you go, the more traffic you are likely to get from a search engine term PROVIDED you have a Title Meta Tag and a Description Meta tag that makes people want to click on your listing in the SERPS!

Definition Search Engine Sandbox

Most commonly called the Google Sandbox, it is a term that defines a situation where the Search engines penalize your site and your rankings go down or in the case of a new site, the search engines ignore it.

In the case of a new site it takes a while for the search engines to start to "notice" your sites web pages and send traffic. There are SEO tricks you can do to speed this up (especially off page SEO like building links to your pages).

In the case of an existing site it is what happens if a search engine thinks your site is trying to trick it into sending unwarranted traffic. For example putting a keyword 1000 times on a page in white writing so it can't be seen by a human but in hopes that it will fake out a search engine into thinking the page has tons of information about a given keyword. One hint: Don't bother. The search engines are smarter then that.

Thats it for our Definition Search Engine Page!