A website is a collection of web pages, documents and multi-media files that are hosted (stored) on a server (computer) on the Internet. The server can be in your own town, in another part of the country or in another part of the world.

All of the public Internet servers throughout the world are interconnected. When a person goes online with their personal computer, they connect to the Internet and are then able to access all publicly available documents and files stored on the World Wide Web.

The location of a website and its files on the Internet is usually identified by a domain name.

When you type the domain name for a website (website address) into a browser address field, or click on a link to the website via a  search engine results page, you are requesting to view that page and the related files stored on the server at that location (the domain).

Your request is sent from your computer to the server of your Internet service provider, which then passes on your request. The request is passed through a series of interconnected servers until it gets to the ‘host’ server where the website files are stored.

The host server responds to your request by sending the content back to you along a similar path of Internet servers. You are then able to view the web page and related files via your web browser, e.g. FireFox or Internet Explorer.

Since these terms are somewhat abstract some people confuse their website ‘domain name’ with their website ‘hosting’. In my next post I will go into a bit more detail about what a domain name is, and how it relates to your website and hosting.

Many people think that the  Web and the Internet are the same, but they are not. The Internet is the foundation the Web is built upon.

The Internet is a global network of interconnected computers. These interconnected computers are able to share data (information), however not all the data on the Internet is available via the Web. When you get online with your computer, you become part of the Internet, i.e. your computer becomes one of the interconnected computers on the Internet.

The World Wide Web is a system of interconnected servers (computers) that support specially formatted documents (web pages) that contain HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), and hyperlinks. The key elements here are the markup of the documents and the linking within the text and graphics. When clicked upon, these links (hyperlinks) give a user immediate access to additional web pages and multi-media items such as image, video and audio files.

Software applications called ‘browsers’ enable us to access the information on the Web. Two of the most popular browsers are Internet Explorer (Microsoft), and FireFox (Mozilla). Other browsers commonly used are Safari (Apple), Opera and most recently, Chrome (Google).

It is the specially formatted documents, the linking within them, and the related files, all accessible via a browser, that make up the World Wide Web.

In a nutshell, without the Web the Internet would still exist, without the Internet the Web could not exist.

Stay tuned for our next post where I will talk about websites and how they work.

Since this is a new blog about web visibility, I thought I would kick things off with a bit of basic information about the driving force of the SEO industry, the search engine.

The World Wide Web (www), or ‘the web’ as it’s more commonly referred to, consists of gazillions of interconnected computers called servers. Stored on these servers are squillions of web pages and files, the same way we store files on our own personal computers. The web pages and files for each website are stored in one or more folders (directories) on these servers.

Search engines work by sending out a robot (web crawler), an automated software program, that crawls the web collecting information. The robots crawl from web page to web page and from website to website by following links. They retrieve the content they crawl, the web pages and related files (image files, PDF files, Word documents etc.) which are then added to the search engine database (index). Search engine marketers commonly refer to this as ‘indexing’.

Each search engine has an algorithm, a set of rules by which it determines the value, validity and relevance of the content it has retrieved.

When a web user types in a search term (keyword) at that search engine, the content the search engine considers most pertinent to the search query, based upon its algorithm, will rank highest in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

The search engine robots aren’t genius and can only do what they’ve been programmed to do. They’re also not human, and historically have not been able to do many of the things that humans can do, e.g. see images, see flash movies, interact with web pages that require the clicking of a button or the filling in of a form.

A website can be built in ways that can either promote or inhibit crawling by a search engine robot. If a robot can’t navigate a website easily, it can’t access all the content. In turn, this means that the search engine will not index the content. If the content isn’t in the search engine database, there is no way for a web user searching at that search engine to ever see those web pages come up in the search results.

Ideally, to promote crawling and indexing of all of a website’s content, the website should be built to web standards using search engine friendly coding. If that content is also optimized for the search engines by adding target search terms in the appropriate places, then the search engine robots will be able to identify & evaluate the website content and rank it for its target search terms (keywords). This will give your web pages a better chance of being seen by the web user searching for your topic, products or services at that search engine.

Knowing the basics of how search engines work is not only the beginning of achieving good web visibility, it is also important to properly approach website search engine optimization.

Thanks to Jeff Jones Illustration for the artwork :-)