Primary Types of Search Engines and Directories

by Roger Glass

Key to improving your Web site’s rank in the different search engines is understanding the basic criteria by which searchengines index and then retrieve documents. Before you go and submit or re-submit your Web site to each search engine,we want you to have the tools and information to maximize your results. For our purposes there are two primary kinds of search services: 1. search engines: These use “spiders” to index Web sites. You submit your page to a search engine and the “spider”will index your entire site. Theoretically these "spiders" might find your site by accident, but odds are they will notunless you go to them and tell them about your site by filling out their "submit" page. Examples are AltaVista, Excite,Lycos, and others. 2. Directories: These rely on submissions from users and Web site owners to populate their indexes. Most directoriesadd your site to their index, but generally they link only to your home page rather than indexing the full text of eachpage on your site. Examples are Yahoo!, Linkstar, and WWW Yellow Pages. GOLDEN RULE OF SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING“To Achieve A Top Position In A Particular search engine, Analyze What Other High Ranking Web Pages Have Done!”If there is one rule that should be referred back to as the refrain in search engine positioning, it is this: The best way to move up the search result list is to learn what kind of things affect your rankings and then analyze the pages of those who ranked higher than you did (those Web sites that ranked in the Top 10) for real clues on how you can achieve that high ranking, too. Search engines change their ranking algorithm from time to time. A page in your Web site that earned a top ranking last week might drop in the rankings just a few months later – and then, left untouched, that same page could climb right back into its old search position a while later, although this is less likely to happen by chance. The trick to always being on top is to learn the variables that can be influenced and analyze the contents of the top Web sites to see what they’re doing better than you. (Refer to the detailed report in WebPosition for an easy reference). Literally click on their listings, visit their site and select “view” from the pull-down menu in Netscape and then the “Document Source” selection on that menu. You can do the same in Microsoft Explorer. This allows you to view the actual HTML code that makes up their page. Ask yourself, “is a particular keyword more prominent in their title tag than in mine?” (i.e., is the keyword placed at the beginning of the title or perhaps repeated more times?) And, “is a particular keyword more prominent (is the important keyword the first second, or third word in their site’s title or META tags?) or repeated more often in their description META tag or in the actual copy that makes up their page than on my Web site?” Perhaps they are using the keyword in the heading tags, or keywords appear in hyperlinks to other internal pages or some other way that you had not considered or are not using. This is the proven way to isolate the variables and climb ahead of other sites in search engines.

Article source: ArticlePros.com