This post is part of an ongoing series: How Search Really Works.
Last week: Meta Keywords.

A web page can only have a limited number of words — but can receive an unlimited number of links.

It’s not rare for web pages to have more words about them than on them.

Because links are formulated by people whom generally don’t benefit from lying about your web page, search engines put an awful lot of trust and faith in them.

Keywords in links trump keywords in content.

It’s been a while now that I’ve wanted to write about search from scratch. Seeing the enthusiasm and openness with which Kimberly Bock (aka SpostareDuro) learns and writes about learning SEO basics inspires me to make that "someday" a "today".

In its simplest form a computer can be taught to search by giving it two sets of information: a series of documents to be indexed and a list of irrelevant words.

The list of irrelevant words includes common words (a, an, the, etc.) but can also include stop words; words you don’t want to have in your index.