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Major Search Engines: Who they are, how they work, how to submit, how to get listed?Unlike a nicely Dewey Decimal organized library, the WWW is a mess of billions of pages of unrelated material and information. Search engines quickly evolved in an attempt to find and organize all the information found on the internet. From Infoseek, Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite, Yahoo, and WebCrawler in the early days of the internet, we have evolved to several main competitors in the highly strategic and lucrative field of internet search: Yahoo, Google, MSN, Ask Jeeves, with Google being far and away the prominent search engine most often used.
Search engines must first crawl or spider tens of millions (and even into billions) of webpages, indexing and analyzing all the text and information they find on those pages. All that data is fed into a huge index or directory, and then somehow sorted or ranked to provide orderly viewing of the information, in an attempt to show the best matching pages for any given search query. Google revolutionized the search business and made it much more accurate by tying a sites ranking to the number of other sites that linked to it, in a sort of internet popularity contest. The premise is that other longstanding sites won't link to you unless they consider your site valuable, and this largely keeps spam results out of the majority of search results. While other search engines were filled with listing for pornography and other spam topics, Google reliably provided accurate search results, and they quickly became the #1 search engine. Search Engine SubmissionsIf you have a website, you can either spend lots of money on advertising trying to get people to visit your site and learn your URL, or you can rely on search engines to direct visitors to your site when searching for a particular topic. How do you get listed in a search engine? One way is to submit your site. You visit the search engine home page, follow the link for site submissions, and type in your URL and information and hopefully a little spider program will visit your site, analyze it, and include your data in the massive index/directory of all the other 10's of billions of pages. Yahoo is even so kind as to allow you to PAY to get your site CONSIDERED for inclusion in their open directories - and editor will decide if it is an appropriate fit, but they may not even consider it unless you drop a few hundred $$ in their direction. You can also get other sites to link to yours - that way when spiders visit other sites they follow the links to yours, then follow the links inside your pages to rate and rank all your pages. And of course Google favors sites with a lot of outside links, so this works in your favor in terms of where you will appear in the rankings. Placement in search result rankings is also key - being the 12,000 result listing doesn't do you much good since most people won't browse past the first 20 or 30 search results.
How Search Engines Ranks PagesSo how do you get a high search engine ranking? How does Google Page Rank work? Once a search engine knows you exist, it then has to determine how you rank in your particular topic against all the other competing sites on the same topic (lets say "batteries"). The search engines will look how often and in what context specific keywords appear in your page header and body, what kind of links you have on your page related to that topic, and how many other sites link back to you. Using HTML Meta tags for title, body, and keywords can vastly help in fine tuning your placement among search results for specific key words. All this and more is sorted through their complex mathematical algorithms in determining page ranks and search result ratings. Google Page Rank (1-10) is a ranking of how popular and influential your page is, as measured by how many other sites link to it. Getting a rank of 5 or above can be difficult, especially for new sites.What is SEO? Search Engine OptimizationA number of companies claim to specialize in search engine optimization (seo). It's not that they have any special "in" or "pull" at the search engines, they just know the tips and insider secrets and techniques that are most effective at getting a good page ranking for your site. They often start with key word targetting in your Title, Keyword, and Description tags. Then they move on to creating a lot of specific doorway pages that will get you high rankings for particular words and phrases. They may even have a network of existing sites that they will add a link to you on in order to improve your overall rankings and get indexing spiders to visit you more often. Do your research here before hiring anyone - make sure they guarantee results or offer a money back guarantee, and make sure they will support you over time - having a great listing for 1 month is no good if it disappears after that.Please read our other articles for information on:
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