How do Search Engines Work?
Here's some insight about Search Engines from Register.com's SEO Expert Don Deveau.
Essentially, search engines look for relevant content (how often the popular words for your industry, business and geography appear on your site) combined with significant link share (links from your website to another). There are other factors involved, but if you have these two search engine optimization factors in place, then you have a good chance of ranking high in the search results.
Relevant Content
To search engines, content is king - keyword rich content, that is. Simply put, if you tell the search engines that you wish to be indexed for a particular keyword phrase (by coding that phrase in your Meta tags when your site is developed) then that phrase needs to show up in your website copy. Not only that, it needs to show up frequently enough on your site, to convince search engines that your site is relevant to the searcher's request.
Let's say, for example, you want your website to appear in the search results for "wedding planning". When a searcher types "wedding planning" into Google's search box, Google first checks its vast database to see which sites claim to be about that particular topic. Lo and behold, it finds 4,410,000 entries related to the phrase "wedding planning". So, why should your website show up on Page 1 instead of Page 10,000 of this search? Because your site includes the relevant phrases to enable Google's algorithms to assign a high ranking. The ranking denotes the probability that a site contains the information the searcher is looking for and it drives the order in which website listings appear in a search engine's results.
TAKE AWAY NUMBER 1: Optimizing your website means making sure you have relevant content on your pages.
Link Popularity
Relevant content may not always be enough, especially for highly competitive search terms. (Just for fun, search for 'lawyers' and see how many results are returned). If your page has great keyword density but nobody knows about it, it doesn't do well in search engines. Search engines favor pages that are linked to by several other websites, especially if they have good content with good keyword phrases. Consider how many times have you clicked on a link to a site from another site? This is called "link popularity." Websites that are linked-to by other sites tend to be good, informative and helpful websites. Search engines tend to view these back links as "votes of confidence." Search engines have software programs called "spiders" that "crawl" from one link to another so they can catalog the amount of back links each site has.
TAKE AWAY NUMBER 2: Links are important and a huge determinant in search engine rankings.
