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Site Promotion - Search Engines, Part 1We field more questions about search engines than on any other type of website promotional vehicle, so this article will be the first of several devoted to search engine promotion. There are many different ways to promote your website and for your particular business, there may be more effective ways to promote it than in the search engines. But, since most people think that search engines are the "magic bullet" of website promotion, we'll start by talking about how they work and why it is so difficult to get listed in the top 10 sites. A Search Engine Introduction There are thousands of search engines. Some are known all over the world (like Alta Vista) while others are very specific in their focus (i.e. only covering sites that deal with water related websites like http://www.aqueous.com). For our purposes, we will only discuss the major search engines and directories. <Note> The major search engines are AOL Search, Alta Vista, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos, MSN, Netscape, Northern Light and WebCrawler. The major directories are Goto.com, LookSmart, The Open Directory, Snap and Yahoo!. Directories vs. Search Engines Let's make a quick distinction here. A directory is a site like Yahoo! or The Open Directory. When a website is submitted to a directory, it must be submitted to a specific category and you need to provide a title and description for the site. When a site is submitted to a search engine, it isn't submitted to a specific category. Instead, the site is "spidered" by a program that reads the information on the page. The site is then put into the search engine's index. That's a very quick overview of how sites are added to search engines and directories. Sites are retrieved in different ways as well. When you enter a key word or phrase as a search using a directory, the results you receive will have those keywords or phrases in the titles and descriptions given for the site, as shown below. Usually, you will be presented with matching categories first, then websites. In the case of Yahoo, you will also be presented with web page matches from the Inktomi database.
Getting results from a search engine is very different. Search engines display pages in order of "relevancy" to the search words. Relevancy is measured differently in different search engines and we will talk about this topic in more detail. Below is an example of a search for "standard poodles" in Alta Vista.
You'll notice that in the search results for "standard poodles" in Yahoo and Alta Vista, the sites that came up all had the words "standard poodles" in the titles of the sites or in the descriptions. However, you'll also notice that the sites that are in the top 3 listings in each search engine are not the same. Directories display results by showing matching categories first, then matching websites in alphabetical order. In contrast, search engines display results in terms of "relevancy". So, what exactly is "relevancy"? The term relevancy is used to describe how closely a particular page matches a given keyword or phrase used in a search. Here's a list of some things search engines take into consideration to determine the relevancy of a page:
Some of these criteria are used to judge whether a page is trying to "spam" the index. In this context, "spamming" refers to the submission of a page that tries to fool the search engine into thinking that the page is more relevant than it really is. Some techniques used include the over-repetition of a keyword, text the same colour as the page background so it can't be read (but it can be indexed by a search engine), really small text that is very difficult to read (normally used for stuffing more keywords onto the page). Pages like this usually don't rank well. What can you legally do that works? One characteristic of a website that will consistently help its ranking in the search engine is quality content, and lots of it. By providing quality content, your site will probably not break any search engine "spamming" rules and the more pages of content you provide, the more you can submit to the search engine for indexing. If you have one page that talks about standard poodles and another website has 10 pages that talks about standard poodles, their breeding, characteristics, how to treat doggie breath etc., the other website is probably more "relevant" than your page because it provides more quality information related to poodles and dogs in general than your single page. By having more than one page to submit to the search engines, the other website has a 10 times greater chance of having at least one of its pages considered to be highly relevant in that search engine. Content is King! Quality content is the best way for your site to be "relevant" in the major search engines and is the first step towards successful website promotion. Keep in mind that this relevance is only related to the main topic you cover in your website. So, if you would like your website to be found under a particular search phrase or keyword in the search engines, you need to talk about that topic a fair amount on your website. For your site to be ranked highly for a couple of different keywords or phrases, you need to tailor your content to include those keywords or phrases. Following our canine example, don't expect a site about dogs that never uses the word "poodle" to be highly ranked (or appear at all) under a search for "standard poodles". That wraps up our introduction to the search engines. Upcoming tips will explain how some common website designs actually hinder the ability to promote a website in the search engines, how long it takes for search engines to index your site and different software packages that can help you with your search engine promotion. See you soon! Internet
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