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THE BASICS
Search engine rankings
There are several hundred search engines, directories, and link pages on the
Internet. However, approximately 90% of users use mainly the major search
engines and several major directories (See final
section of this guide for details). Each of these search
engines conducts their searches in a different manner, and it is important to
understand what each of the engines looks for when a user inputs a search.
Based on criteria which each engine had devised, a relevancy rating is
determined for the keywords the user inputted. If a user searches under
¡®Promotion¡¯, the search engine will scan its database to determine which sites
are most relevant for that particular keyword search. Using more search terms
(e.g. ¡®Web Site Promotion¡¯) will
provide a more concise list, which may be entirely different from results
generated for ¡®Promotion¡¯.
The key to increasing your rankings in the search engines is to know what
criteria is used by each engine to determine relevancy, understand what
keywords your potential visitors are searching with, and make the appropriate
changes to our web pages.
The major aspects of a web site which search engines use to judge relevancy
are:
- Page titles
- Meta tags
(descriptions and keywords)
- Frequency of search
keywords within the entire page
- Heading tags
- ALT tags used for
images
- Overall popularity
of the site.
Each of these criteria, and how to optimize the your web site for them will be
discussed in more detail below. Although certain techniques will only work on
some of the search engines, it is a good idea to optimize the site for each of
the above criteria. For example, Infoseek and AltaVista rely heavily on page
titles, meta tags, and keyword frequency. Other such as Excite completely
ignore meta keywords and descriptions, but rather index the entire page, and
use their own logic rules to determine what the page¡¯s topics are.
To increase the rankings in each of the engines, it is necessary to use all of
the techniques given to us.
Differences between search engines and
directories
Search engines (i.e. Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek)
are different from directories (Yahoo!, Starting
Point):
Search engines are large databases which use a technology generally called a
spider (also called crawlers or robots)
which automatically visits Internet sites and indexes them based on the
criteria mentioned above. Spiders move about the Internet visiting new and
previously indexed sites, looking for additions, changes and bad links. They
are completely automated and can ¡®crawl¡¯ upwards of 10 million web pages per
day!
Directories however, are generally created manually, with a live person
actually visiting Internet sites and determining if they should be listed and
in what category they best fit. The main differences being that directories
generally take much longer to add or modify site listings, and that they do not
rank results by relevancy, but rather list them by category, often in
alphabetical order within each category. The most popular directory, Yahoo!,
presents a variety of unique challenges to web promotion which will be
discussed below.
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