Search Engines

With estimates that 85% of users rely on search engines to locate websites, information and products, a website owner must emphasise the importance of search engine promotion within their marketing plan.

Out of all the search engines on the internet there are about 7 that dominate. These are Google, Inktomi, Fast, Teoma, Dmoz, LookSmart, and Alexa. These are actual search engines as opposed to search portals. The difference being is that search engines do the searching on large amounts of data and supply search data to the majority of search engine portals on the internet.

There are smaller engines on the internet, but almost 90% of the traffic will be generated by these major players. Some search engine portals receive data from more than one source particularly if they advertise in their search results. AOL for example is enhanced by Google, but the paid listing results are from the Overture pay per click search engine.

If you have been on the internet long enough you will have seen the adds promising to promote your site to thousands of search engines. The problem is there aren't thousands of actual search engines out there! Some sites claim to submit your site to 50,000 or 100,000 engines etc, but what they really mean is that they will submit your site to a few engines and the rest to Free For All link sites also known as FFA. These sites have little value and will generate no meaningful traffic, but will take your email address and do as they please with it.

Robots- Search Engines have web indexing robots that traverse the internet following links looking for and indexing website content. This information is then stored on their servers and made searchable. Web indexing robots are used by many search engines such as Google, Inktomi, AltaVista and others. These web indexing robots are also known as spiders. These spiders/robots are the tools used by engines to harvest data for their search engines. When you submit your website to the engines, you are effectively asking the search engines to send their web indexing robot to your website so that it can be crawled and added to their database. Each engine has their own set of algorithms for determining website rank and relevancy within this database. Each engine has its own twist on the variable, but they all act in similar ways.

Search Directories - Such as Dmoz.org and Yahoo. Have a hierarchal structure to them and often have editors reviewing websites prior to listing them to ensure a quality index.

Pay Per Click Search Engines - Search engines that allow you to bid on keywords. Top bids on a key word show up higher. PPC should be looked at as search engine advertising, but can be useful for websites to generate an immediate boost in traffic.

Keyword popularity - Research your keyword popularity. Find words that real people use when searching for your type of product or service. Utilise these keywords and phrases in your content, meta tags (especially title), These Keywords should be repeated at least 4 times in your content.

eyya.com can achieve good results for you but you need to get involved too.

Optimization of a website is a continually ongoing process. Everyone is fighting to get to top ranking positions so it is important to keep track and continually tweak your site content inorder to stay on top. This is where your Hosting and Maintenance Package really helps keep costs down.

Company: Keyboard dabs Search Engine: Yahoo.com Search Words: Computer and Telepnone Cleaning Result: 1st Page, position 4 out of 64.4 Million Results (3-03-08)
Company: Totally Typing Search Engine: Yahoo.com Search Words: Audio Typing London Result: 1st Page, position 1 out of 33.9 Million Results (3-03-08)
Company: Ultimate Ear Protection Search Engine: Google.com Search Words: Hearing Protection Result: 1st Page, position 5 out of 4.5 Million Results (3-03-08)
Company: Aero Support Search Engine: Google.com Search Words: Aero Support Result: 1st Page, position 1 out of 700K Results (3-03-08)