Want to find something on the Internet? All you have to do is type a keyword or two in a search engine – and voila! – thousands or millions of websites with potential matches appear. Instead of having to sift through each one to determine which of these pages might be most useful to you, the search engines do all of the time consuming and monotonous work for you, ranking the results in order of relevance to your query within a matter of seconds.

There are many types of search engines, but the most popular by far are crawler-based engines. Crawler-based engines visit websites and make copies of the content in their index for quick and easy reference. When a user types in a search query, these engines scan their indexes to find the most relevant and authoritative websites that represent a quality match. Google, Yahoo! and Bing are examples of this type of search engine.

Other variations of crawler-based websites include scraper sites that compile results from other search engines, such as Dogpile, and question-and-answer engines such as Ask.com that allow you to pose your query in the form of a question and receive the results in a relevant answer form. Human-powered directories such as the online version of Yellow Pages or Dex allow businesses to submit their websites manually to the directory for easy category retrieval by industry, business, location or other variable.

Despite various niche types of search engine platforms, Google, Yahoo! and Bing remain the big players in the search engine landscape. And from an SEO perspective, these are most certainly the biggies for increasing traffic and conversions. Ranking highly in these engines, especially Google, is a surefire recipe for success.

Want to learn how your website can rank highly in the major search engines? Give us a call at 1-877-Rank-321 to speak to an SEO strategist today!