Search Engines – Getting In, Getting Up.
If you are a complete NEWBIE please also take the time to read the tutorial on META TAGS.
As we all know by now there are many different search engines available to us, some are better than others but all have one thing in common – They help people find us.
With this in mind it is obvious that to generate as much free traffic as possible we should be listed in as many search engines as possible and with the highest possible ranking within each.
Q. But how do we achieve this?
A. We submit our site(s) to the required search engine.
Q. What are you talking about and what do I submit?
A. I’ll explain about META Tags later (html code items), it’s important for you to understand why you’re adding code to your web pages and what effect it could/should have before delving into code.
Before moving on it should be noted that there might be many, many search engines out there but there are only a handful which account for the vast majority of web traffic, Yahoo is of course the main player in this field (at the time of writing) and it should also be noted that each search engine has its’ own requirements, search/ranking algorithms and of course method of examining submitted pages.
I point this out because some of the later comments might appear contradictory if you don’t understand this point.
As mentioned Yahoo Is the largest searchable directory on the Internet (with data provided by amongst others Google), making it a desirable site to obtain a quality listing in. However, getting listed in Yahoo is much more difficult than the rest of the popular search engines as all listings are validated by hand, not by a web spider (I will mention how search engines automate the page search later). In fact, Yahoo isn't a search engine at all because it does not index Meta tags or content from the sites that it lists. While this insures accuracy of the directory's content, and virtually eliminates spam - it also hinders a webmaster's chances of successfully promoting the full content of his or her website and makes it difficult to obtain a listing at all. Fortunately there are several actions that you can take to increase both a chance of a directory listing and the quality of your listing.
Only a fraction of the sites submitted ever get listed, not just because of Yahoo's high standards, but also because of the amount of time it takes to review sites by hand. To improve your chances of a review and subsequent listing there are a few things that you can do. First, there is the expensive way.
Yahoo offers priority reviews for $199. While the priority review does not guarantee a listing, it does guarantee that Yahoo will look at your site in a timely fashion (and send out a letter when your site is accepted or rejected).
Next, there is the cheap way to improve your chances of getting a Yahoo listing (free!). Yahoo has certain categories that are submitted to less than others, mostly "regional" categories. Since Yahoo's employees are each responsible for their own categories, the maintainers of these "less full" categories can review a larger percent of their submitted sites daily. However, and this vital, before you submit make certain that all of your links are working, the category is appropriate, and the design is attractive and relatively quick loading or your link will not be added.
Q. What are the search engines actually looking at on our pages?
A. They’re looking at a number of things such as title, Meta tags and body text.
The order of Yahoo's official search ranking will provide you with an outline, and is as follows:
- keywords found in category
- keywords found in title
- Keywords found in description.
So the obvious first step to improving your search ranking is to find a category with keywords that you would like to appear as search words.
Next on the list, keywords in title can be manipulated with a little thought. Say for example, you sell lawn-care supplies over the Internet, and your website is called "Green Care". Since Yahoo will only allow your title to appear exactly as it does on your site, you can change the logo and <title> tag on your site to read "Green Care Landscaping Supplies", and submit to Yahoo thereby adding keywords.
Finally we look at your Yahoo description. The add form that Yahoo provides states that you may use one or two sentences equaling no more than twenty five words. In reality, if your description was this long, it would be cut down to only a few words of Yahoo's choosing. To prevent this, you should choose a simple sentence of no more than ten words without any punctuation or conjunctions, Yahoo loves to cut off a long sentence at a conjunction. Although Yahoo provides a form to modify your site's listing, it is important to get it right the first time, as this form has been known to be a red herring; it doesn't really work for anything more than altering a URL.
This of course relates to Yahoo But the same in terms of ‘what are they looking at?’ it’s a common story for the vast majority of the search engines. The only notable difference is that most machine parsed search engines also compare your title, description and body text to calculate the relevance of your title/description and content.
So far we’ve looked at submitting only to Yahoo, this is of course the main one but you should also submit to others:
http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php
http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/addurl
http://dmoz.org/add.html
http://www.google.com/addurl.html
http://static.wc.ask.com/docs/addjeeves/submit.html
http://www.infospace.com/info.nbci/kmaint/kdbadd.html
http://searchservices.lycos.com/searchservices/
http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm
http://www.infignos.com/addlisting/speedlist.cfm
http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/
http://pages.alexa.com/help/webmasters/index.html
https://allestra.safeserver.com/submit/submit.asp ($49 list fee)
http://www.amray.com/cgi/amray/addurl.cgi
http://www.claymont.com/cgi-bin/addurlsform.pl
http://www.clickit.com/touch/add-link.htm#CLICKITFORM
http://usww.com/exchange/index.cgihttp://www.dinosearch.com/dinosearch/addurl.asp
http://www.entireweb.com/eng/addurl/
http://search.aol.com/add.asp
http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=addurl
http://www.excite.com/info/add_url_form
http://hotbot.lycos.com/addurl.asp
http://www.directhit.com/util/addurl.html
http://www.canada.com/search/web/addurl.asp
The above list shows a number of the search engines that you might want to submit your site to, this is however not an exhaustive list.
The ONE that I would recommend as a good starting place is dmoz.org.
Q. Why?
A. A lot of the search engines don’t crawl the entire web, they instead use indexes built by others as a starting point and build from them, so DMOZ would for example provide Google with a list of web sites, Google would then point their own spiders at this list and build their own index based on this list. To give you a rough idea of how useful this kind of submission is I was doing the search engine submission for one of my sites and found that it was being ignored or placed at the bottom of the list, I then submitted to dmoz and low and behold my site then featured in a host of other search engines automatically. So if nothing else it’s an interesting back door to some of the larger search engines.
Q. So where does everyone get there data from?
A. Yahoo own Alltheweb, so when you search on Alltheweb you will see a similar set of results, they may use a slightly different algorithm but it’s got a Yahoo flavor.
Lycos use Inktomi for web results which again is owned by Yahoo, they get their paid for results by insite adbuyer, their own PPC offering.
Excite at the moment get most of their paid for index from a paid for inclusion offering from Aksjeeves.
There are now only three main self crawling engines which are Google, Yahoo and the new MSN* which is to be released in the near future.
Q. You mentioned META TAGS!
A. Yes. Meta tags relate to tags in your HTML that describe your page. The two main Meta tags that you should be concerned with at keywords and description.
The keywords tag is, as the title suggests, a list of keywords that people might use to find you site. The description tag is a piece of text that should describe your site.
The spiders will also look at your pages <TITLE> blah blah blah ….. </TITLE> tag and text on your page (including alt tags on images) to build up their stats. If you are new to this area there is a specific article that deals only with Meta tags you might want to read (it includes suggestions, limitations and examples).
Q. You mentioned SPIDERS!
A. Yep, I did. A spider is the name given to the web agent (piece of software) that visits web sites and produces a stream of data for the indexer relating to the content, title, description, etc that it finds on the site. The spider will typically navigate your site via links, this in turn means that it might not get to your site unless links to it exist on a page that it is already looking at – this is why links are so important. Spidering and crawling are the same thing.
Remember, listing your site is not something that happens over night.
The search engines have a schedule by which they crawl the web indexing, for example Google does one full scan a month and two minor scans. The minor scans only look at existing known sites whereas the full scan looks at everything it finds, hence if you miss a full scan one month it will probably be another month before you are in Google. The other search engines operate similar systems of incremental crawling but thus far I have not found any that offer anywhere near real time indexing of user requests.
Let us assume that we now have our website indexed, it’s in Google, MSN and a few of the others – however – it’s so far down the list that you’d need the patience of a monk to find it (if you knew it was there in the first place).
Q. How can we improve our page ranking and how can we get more traffic?
A. Well that’s two separate questions. More traffic will be discussed in another article, however we will mention improved page ranking.
There are a couple of ways of improving a sites page ranking, a free and not so free method.
The not so free method involves paying for results, for example Overture. You supply them with your keywords and you agree up front how much you’re prepared to pay per click or per ranking point. This can be expensive as some people are paying up to 5 dollars a click or ‘a lot’ for high ranking or sponsor spots within search engine results.
The free way is more time consuming – but free.
As I’ve previously mentioned when a site is crawled links to and from you page are what counts, therefore you want as many links into your site as possible, however, you want these links to be from sites where the content is relevant to your site i.e. cooking à nuclear physics = bad, cooking à BBQ = good.
Q. So how do I get these links?
A. There are again a couple of methods. You could get in touch with other web masters and ask if they’d be prepared to done some reciprocal linking, you can pay other webmasters to display your banner/link or alternatively you could join a forum and include a signature.
This last point is the easiest and cheapest. Most forums will allow you to create a signature message, this could be something as simple as ‘thanks, Dave’ or something a cunning as ‘thanks, Dave Daves_website.Com’
The href text that you enter will be picked up by the spider that crawls the forum as a link to your site, this then is an incoming link and as most reputable forums are long established with high page ranking this can only be good for you. You should also note that with a forum each posting is viewed as a page, hence the more you post the more incoming links there are from that site.
This incoming link concept is typically referred to as link popularity.
If you have created your site and submitted it to several search engines you may want to check how it’s doing in the ranking or check link popularity. I have found one site that offers this analysis (for FREE) online and I’d encourage you to use its functions whilst it’s still free, they are WIDEXL.COM (http://www.widexl.com/remote.html).
That’s it for this article but don’t forget if you want to know more about Meta tags look for the tutorial and if you want to know more about getting more traffic to your site check out the article for that.
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