Search engines have become an indispensable part of Internet marketing. Yet, as an Internet marketing company I can honestly say first hand, that most of us don’t have a clue as to how they actually work. Healthy rewards can be had if organizations simply better understood how search engines work and implement the best practices of modern search engine optimization with their Internet marketing.  
Now don’t be frightened. It isn’t necessary to delve into the complex mathematical algorithms that power the Googles of the world. An organization’s Internet marketing strategy can only be enriched with at least a basic understanding of the three major components that power search engines, and the general approach to nurturing them so they understand our content and rank us the way we want.

1. Crawling – most of us have heard the term, but what does it mean? Search engines using “spiders” literally crawl the web looking for content. Spiders find information on a web page, read it, and then tirelessly follow links from your page to other pages. Spiders periodically return looking for any changes to the original page, which means that you can always modify and improve your content.
   An effective Internet marketing plan implements valuable content in a way in which search engines find it. Code must be clean and fast loading. If for any reason the spider can’t see or understand your content, your page can’t be indexed and ranked. 
   
2. Indexing – Storage of data that spiders find is indexed inside a giant database. Spiders are very good to searchers. They crawl the web planet saving every bit of content for the future of searchers. An effective Internet marketing plan must recognize the value of your published content as it interacts with search engines. The more content you have, the better chance you have of being found, and a strong Internet marketing plan will emphasize the value of providing good quality, keyword rich content – and lots of it. 
   
3. Ranking – Your Internet marketing plan must also consider the final critical aspect of search technology – the way the search engine decides to deliver the most relevant results to searchers. This is accomplished by those complex algorithmic functions mentioned earlier. That’s a fancy way of saying that search software follows a complex set of rules. These are the ground rules that help to determine your content vs. other content that might satisfy a searcher’s keyword query.

Here’s something else that Internet marketers need to know. Ok, so you know content is king and that’s what spiders feed on. But here’s something that might be surprising to you. Search engines are not as intelligent as you might think. Your content has to be presented in such a way that search engines accept it. If you don’t use the words in certain locations and frequencies along with other SEO copywriting best practices, both you and the search engines are out of luck. That’s why every Internet marketing plan must revere their content first and foremost. At the end of the day you want people to find you, with the keywords they use when searching.
Internet marketers must first understand that unique, engaging, quality content matters first and foremost beyond just keyword location and frequency.