4.1. Understanding What a Search Engine Sees as Keywords

In this section, we take a step back first and talk about what search engines really see as keywords. When someone enters a search query, the search engine looks for those words in its index. Here are some general things the search engine looks for:

• Web pages that contain the exact phrase.

• Web pages that have all the words of the phrase in close proximity to each other.

• Web pages that contain all the words, although not close together.

• Web pages that contain other forms of the words (such as customize instead of customization). This is called stemming.

• Web pages that have links pointing to them from other pages, in which the link text contains the exact phrase or all of the words in a different sequence.

• External Web pages that link to this site from a page that is considered to be about the same keyword.

• Web pages that contain the words in special formatting (bold, italics, larger font size, bullets, or with heading tags).