Search Engines
What Are Search Engines and How Do
They Work?
Having a great Web site is not enough. You also have to bring people to it. The
fastest and easiest way to get visitors to your Web site is to register it with
the major search engines and online directories, which is usually free!
How do search engines work?
Search engines use automated software (known as robots or spiders) to follow
links on Web sites, harvesting information as they go. When someone submits a
query to a search engine, the engine returns a list of sites, ranking them on
their relevance to the keywords used in the search. How search engines assess
your site and determine the relevance of the words often depends on how the
specific search engine works. Some engines, such as Excite, use artificial
intelligence to recognize concepts that frequently appear together. Other search
engines, list the more popular sites first. There is no way to guarantee that
your site will come up on top in a search. After all, we can't all come up top!
Which search engines should I register with?
All of them, well most of them wouldn't hurt. It is often quoted that the top 7
search engines account for 95% of web traffic combined; Yahoo!, AltaVista,
Excite, Infoseek, HotBot, Lycos and WebCrawler. Actually, Yahoo isn't really a
search engine, but rather a directory. There are hundreds for you to choose
from.
How long does it take to be listed?
Don't expect your site to show up in search engines immediately. It can take
anything from 24 hours to 6 weeks or more! It depends on the search engine. Most
search engine crawlers typically retrieve only a few pages from each site on
each visit and visits can be weeks apart.
How do I get my Web site to the top of search engines?
Keyword in URL and domain name
Nonetheless many traditional search engine marketers experts have been very
reluctant in admitting and acknowledging this factor, it is almost self-evident
that it does have tangible influence in boosting relevance in Google search
engine results. Keywords in URL indicate that relevant keywords are used in the
actual file name of the page published. The same applies to the overall domain
name of the site. The more "tuned" to the effective content it provides, the
better.
Keyword in title tag
Page title remains one of the highest ranking factors. Nothing new under the
sun, but do pay attention to how you build your titles in order to make this
truly effective.
Freshness of Pages
Google likes newer content.
Freshness - Amount of Content Change
Do you have a lot of old content and only a few new pages appearing every now
and then or do you have lots of new content coming out constantly with a
balanced number of aging pages? Google likes the latter.
Frequency of Updates
The more frequently you update and change your content (up to a limit - then it
turns into a negative factor) the better it is. Though this is my own
speculation, I would expect news sites that update their home page multiple
times per day (up to those who do it every hour) to be the best ranked.
Popularity ("backlinks")
This is the total number of web links pointing to your site from other ones. To
measure yourself this go to Yahoo Search and type:
linksite:www.your-domain-name.com or linkdomain:www.yourdomainname.com or check
one of these other options.
Anchor text for inbound links
This is one of the most effective factors affecting your ranking inside Google
page results. The key here is to have other sites link to you by using as anchor
text to the link pointing to you, the specific keywords for which you want to
increase reach and visibility. For example if I wanted this very site (MasterNewMedia.org)
to get a boost in Google search results for queries relating to "communication
tools", I would need to have a significant number of web sites linking to mine
while using the words "communication tools" as the text link.
Traffic trend
It is speculated that via the Google Toolbar, which has a multi-million user
installed base, Google tracks stat data for traffic trends on individual sites
being able therefore to have an "overview" of how any site is performing. This
data should be similar, in its advantages and limitations to the data published
by Alexa (now owned by Amazon.com) which also provides general traffic trend
data for any site on the Internet (also in this case the data is gathered by
collecting behavioral data from people utilizing selected toolbars).
User behavior (bookmark, time spent, how they left)
Google is likely able to track individual behavior on many sites for several
millions Internet users. Based on this statistical data, Google would consider
bookmarking of the site by visitors, time spent on the site, method of leaving
the site and several other ones as relevant factors in evaluating site
credibility.
Give it time
As Google gives critical value to the "age" of your site (spammers don't
generally last very long) in establishing its rank and "credibility", one good
general rule is to give enough time for a site to establish itself. Those
looking for fast and spectacular results may get easily disappointed, but if you
work around some of the key points above in a systematic and consistent way,
results do come indeed.
 Let
8020Tech do the work and list your site with over 150 Search Engines!
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