You’ve got a problem on your hands. You want people to come to your website; after all, the goal is to get people to come to your site so they may buy your products, learn about them, hear about the cause you support, or whatever else your website may intel.
You’ve developed the site with a specific aim in mind. So you’ve determined that you require traffic from
As you’ll see in this article, the search engines aren’t an unrealistic conclusion. However, there are a plethora of search engines to choose from! There are the obvious ones, for example.
You’ve probably heard of the Googles, AOLs, Yahoo!s, and MSNs of the globe, but
Others you may have heard of include HotBot, Dogpile, Inktomi, Ask Jeeves, Netscape, and EarthLink.
Even Amazon has a Web search on practically every page, according to LookSmart.
Lycos and InfoSpace, Teoma and WiseNut, Mamma.com, and WebCrawler are just a few examples. To top it off, you’ve seen advertisements claiming that you can have it for only $49.95.
(or $19.95, $99.95, or whatever amount the advertiser thinks is reasonable),
You can have your website listed in hundreds, if not thousands, of search engines as well.
engines are Some of these services may have even been used by you, just to be disappointed.
that the tidal wave of traffic you were promised never materializes.
I’ve got some wonderful news for you. Almost all of the names I just mentioned are forgettable.
What is the point of this?
The goal of this chapter is to take a complex landscape of thousands of search sites and simplify it.
narrow it down to the few search systems that are truly important.
(Do you want to look for websites? What about search engines? Don’t worry, I’ll explain the difference in a minute.
at this time.)
What Is the Difference Between Search Engines and Directories?
The phrase search engine has supplanted the phrase search system or search site as the most commonly used phrase, but before continuing, it is important to grasp the many sorts of search, that you will come across in your search for information. In general, you should be aware of the following four items:
Search indexes or search engines are both terms that refer to the same thing. These are the most common kind of search tools you’ll come across on the internet. When the word search engine was first used, it was used to refer to a type of search index, which was a massive database comprising information from individual Web sites. For example, Google’s massive index comprises more than 3 billion pages, according to the company. Large search-indexing businesses have thousands of machines that utilize software known as spiders or robots (or simply plain bots — Google’s software is referred to as Googlebot) to collect Web sites and read the information stored on them, as well as to index the information. Despite the fact that these systems do not always capture all of the information included on each page or on all of the pages in a Web site, they do capture a substantial quantity of information and employ complex algorithms to index that information. Google, is the most widely used search engine on the planet.
Search directories include the following: A directory is a collection of information on Web sites that has been organized into categories. The information contained within it is not information from Web pages, but rather information about Web sites. Both Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project (odp.org) own the most prominent search directories on the internet. Companies that provide directory services do not download and index pages from the Web sites in their directory; instead, each Web site in the directory comprises information such as a title and description, which is provided by the directory company. The two most important directories, Yahoo! and Open Directory, both have staff members who examine all of the sites in the directory to ensure that they are placed in the appropriate categories and meet certain quality criteria. Yahoo! and Open Directory are the two most important directories because they are both owned by Yahoo! People submitting sites to smaller directories frequently have the option of specifying which category should be used.
Google is a search engine. But take note of the Directory tab at the top of the page, or the line that says something like “More Sites about: Arthritis” that appears beneath some of the search results. When you click on either the tab or the link, you will be taken to the Yahoo! Directory. (You may get to the directory directly by typing dir.yahoo.com into your browser.)
Indexes that are not spidered: The term “non-spidered indexes” was coined by me because I couldn’t think of anything better for them. Spiders do not review the whole contents of each page in the index in a number of minor indexes that are less important than larger indexes such as Google since they are smaller and less important. Instead, the index contains information about each page’s background, such as its title, description, and keywords. In certain circumstances, this information is derived from the meta tags that are extracted from the pages in the search engine’s index.
Pay-per-click advertising systems: PPC (pay per click) listings are available on several platforms.
Advertisers install small advertisements in the systems, and when users conduct searches, the results include some of these sponsored listings, which are often displayed above and to the right of the unsponsored listings (free listings). PPC systems (pay-per-click advertising) are described in greater depth later in this chapter.