Jim Hedger, SEO & search marketing consultant
What are Search Engines?
articles » search engine optimization
Not All Search Engines are Created Equal
Web design and search engine optimization is vital to your success as an E-commerce site. Without optimizing your web site for particular search engines you leave your site to chance. New sites can not afford to leave their business to chance. Remember that your site competes globally rather than being confined to a small geographic area. You have to know how to get the search engines to help your business succeed.
Not all "search engines" are truly search engines. You're probably saying to yourself, "Ha!". Well, let's see if we can put to rest some of the misunderstandings. "Search engines" can be actually broken down into their base elements with ease. There are search engines, directories, hybrids and Pay Per Click.
First, let's discuss the search engine. True search engines have a robot that worms or crawls its way through sites on the Internet. You've probably heard of them as "spiders" or "crawlers." These "spiders" are used by search engines to map out the Internet and submit site info to the database for later indexing. This indexing sometimes takes weeks to months to happen.
Some of these search engines use meta tags, site content, and/or link popularity to rank web sites. For a site that is new to the Internet it is extremely hard to get a worthwhile link popularity rating because of the newness of the site. Meta tags and page content are the most helpful to these sites. However, it is still often a challenge for some to get indexed because they don't follow the correct page formats required by the search engines. We'll come back to this.
Second, the directories use submittals to supply them with information on web sites. The sites are then approved or disapproved depending upon a human factor. None of the information used by the "spiders" is used to determine placement in a directory. So you ask, what will increase the position of a web site in a directory? Not much luck there really. This depends on properly submitting in the beginning and having content that is looked upon favorably in the area you chose to submit.
Submitting to directories has now become even more of a challenge for the small business owner. Yahoo, and many other directories now charge a fee to get reviewed. (Yahoo charges $299 just to look.) Notice I said reviewed. That does not guarantee that your site will be listed in the directory. Sometimes they do give you one opportunity to make the page suitable to their liking.
Yet, Yahoo will only accept the main page of the site as in http://www.yourdomain.com without any internal pages. The other pages will get listed if the site is accepted. Because these sites are reviewed by humans the entire site gets reviewed and not just the page submitted.
Third, the hybrids use an associated directory format. This means that the indexers, usually human, look at sites listed in sites that can be used to announce the presence of a new web site. Typically, the indexers again look for sites that look appealing. So here you may ask, how do I make my site appealing?
Finally, the Pay Per Click format. These listings pay for qualified leads that are searching the keyword(s)/phrases they feel with help their business the most. Unfortunately, the cost is sometimes very prohibitive to the small business that does not have an advertising budget established.
With all the information that we have on the Internet you can now understand why only a portion of the sites on the Internet are actually listed in search engines. Some people choose not to submit their web sites and let the search engines find them while others choose to submit. So now you might be asking, which way should I go? Should I submit or should I not submit? That depends totally on how you want to market your web site. Again, not all "search engines" are search engines.
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