As part of my ongoing research into how easy it would be for an artist to move from the Mac OS X platform to Linux, I decided to take a look at the open source Inkscape application and compare it to a popular Macintosh drawing program, Macromedia FreeHand.  In a prior job, and as a side business some years ago, I used FreeHand pretty regularly to create graphics.  With FreeHand as my standard (I had tried Adobe Illustrator back in those days and found it very non-intuitive to use), I determined to find out if I could find any serious deficiencies in Inkscape that would make it unsuitable for a former FreeHand user to work with.

In the last article in this series, we took a closer look at search engines. We saw how they find sites to spider, saw how our web site looks to a search engine spider, and talked about how search engines classify pages using keywords and keyphrases. This installment will talk about how search engines decide which pages should be listed first in their results, why others get listed later, and why some get banned or blocked altogether.

In the first article in this series, we saw how search engines work. They have “spiders” which crawl the web looking for pages to store in a database, a “search page” that people use to find web pages of interest, and a “search engine” that helps translate what people ask for into a list of pages that seem to be most relevant. The process looks like this:

But there is a lot more to the “search engine” block in this diagram than there is to any other part of the overall search engine system. As a webmaster, you should be asking yourself several questions about the search engine at this point:

• How does the search engine find a site to spider? (“How do I get my site listed?”)

• What does my web site look like to a spider? (“Is the design of my site preventing spiders from finding my content?”)

• Once the search engine has found a site, how does it know what the pages on that site are about? (“How can I help the search engine figure out what my site is all about?”)

• How does the search engine determine which pages to place at the top of the list and why? (“How can I move my site farther up the list?”)

• What is “Search Engine Spam”? (“How do I avoid looking like Search Engine Spam to a spider?”)

We'll be discussing the answers to some of these questions in this article. The rest will be covered in future articles in this series.