Search Engine BasicsWritten by JC Anderl
Search engines and directories are one of best ways to round up some targeted traffic to your website. Here are basics of search engines and directories.Search Engine Vs. Directories The main difference between engines and directories is way they index sites. Although search engines vary in way they index, they all basically use a "spider" to crawl from link to link and index meta-tags, keywords, and page words to get their relevancy when a user searches their index. Directories, on other hand, have actual people look at a site and decide if they will add it to their directory, and where they will add it. Directory Submission Submitting to directories involves a different process because it more closely involves people. Although definitely not only ones, two very important directories are Yahoo! and Open Directory. If your site is commercial in nature, Yahoo! charges $299 for a review that doesn't even guarantee that you will get listed. It is single most important engine or directory, so if you have money, it is definitely a great idea to submit. To submit to Yahoo! go to http://add.yahoo.com/fast/add?+Business. Just fill out form and they editors will take care of rest. The Open Directory is based on a large group of volunteer editors. It is free to submit your site. To submit, go to www.dmoz.org, web address for Open Directory, and find category that your site would fit in. Take some time and look around, you want to be sure that category that you pick is definitely best one for your site. Once you have found right category, click on add URL link in top right corner.
| | DOES SEARCH ENGINE TRAFFIC MATTER?Written by Bob McElwain
The short answer is, "Sure." And it likely always will. But amount of free traffic search engines now deliver to many small online businesses doesn't amount to much. And what there is of it continues to decline in importance. Pay-for- submission models are rapidly eliminating free options. These trends will continue. And many have been aware of this for years. My own site provides a good example of results. A Question Overlooked A fellow called a while back asking about services I offer. When he asked how my web pages ranked on search engines, I said I didn't know, that I had never checked. I guess that wasn't what he wanted to hear, for he hung up. But it is fact. Why would I care what positions I have? My log files show I'm getting less than 20% of hits from search engines. Given competition for keyword phrases such as "site promotion," it is no surprise I don't get more. Answering The Question Still, call triggered action of sorts. I ran Web Position on my major keywords. The results were startling. I asked program to go 99 listings deep. It found only 4 pages of over 700 on my site listed for keywords entered, and none at all above 50th position. So how am I'm getting hits? The Mystery Of Search Engines Unanswered All above report means is that I am not getting many hits on keywords I felt were appropriated for a particular page. For example, site promotion brought up my Tips page as #86 at AltaVista. And this in itself is startling, for page changes every week! (It's also entirely in size 1, something some experts believe AltaVista considers spam.) Web Editorial Service was #73 at Lyris, but page is not an article I wrote. Web Site Promotion Services was #52 at Google. Site Promotion Services was #6 at Overture.com, but I paid for this position. In opening STAT, I followed advice that proved to be bad info. I developed a massive set of targeted keywords for site. Most of terms I began with have disappeared since exploring with them. And with but few exceptions, I now have only clues as to keywords on a given page that actually bring a visitor. Still, site initially brought pretty good free traffic from search engines. It peaked about end of 1998 at about 40% of total traffic, and has steadily been declining since.
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