Imagine your website as a virtual store packed to the rafters with data. The 'spiders' (tiny robotic programs) from a search engine, like GoogleT or Yahoo!®, enter your store via your web presence, and scurry around the gathering millions of bits of information and rushing it back to the big search engine, a huge warehouse filled data-base, where it is sorted, categorized and ranked in several criteria. The site that enjoyed the highest cumulative score will be ranked number one on the list.

Websites are ranked in two ways: by relevance, and by importance. These spiders gather raw data from websites about both. Relevance is indexed by what a site is about, with a measured relation to the key words and key word phrases. Importance is indexed by a variety of different methods including the number of other sites that link to a site, (if others consider your site important enough to link up to; it must be important) and by how many people contact it on a search (a crowd gets noticed). It might also take into account the amount of bandwidth a site uses (size matters).

Search Engine Optimization could be called, 'the art of feeding Internet spiders the diet they like.' It's as much art as science. Search engines will never say exactly what methods they are using, for obvious reasons.