To fully appreciate the role of optimization in online marketing, you need to understand what search engines are, how they index, and how they retrieve information. The basics of search engines are described below to help you understand how people find your site on the Word Wide Web.
What are they?
Search engines are information storage, indexing and retrieval tools, or rather systems, allowing users to find information through queries in the form of keywords or keyword phrases typed in the search boxes.
How do they index?
For a website to be found on the Internet, it needs to be indexed by the search engines and directories or be linked from another site. Without the above, the site can only be found when the web address is typed in at the URL space provided. Once a site is submitted to search engines, it is crawled by the spiders or bots. The spiders are tools used by the search engines to crawl through a site to find relevant keywords and content. The pages of the site are then included in the search engine index.
How is information retrieved?
Once a user makes a query for a specific term such as “online marketing” the search engine retrieves pages of sites relevant to the content. Not all pages are equally relevant to a query. To this end, search engines make use of algorithms to determine the relevancy of pages. Factors such as authority, link popularity, age of the site, amount of keywords related to the topic found on a page, ranking, and more come into play. The algorithms used differ from engine to engine.
Some search engines don’t have their own indexes, but crawl through the indexes of other search engines. Dogpile for instance, is a Meta crawler or Meta engine. It searches multiple indexes at once and retrieves the most relevant results from the indexes of many search engines. Intoweb Marketing also recognizes the importance of Meta crawlers and thus ensures that our client sites have Meta tags to guarantee that the pages of their sites can also be retrieved by Meta crawlers.
Difference between a directory and a search engine
A directory on the other hand, is a human compilation of sites. To be included as part of its index, a manual submission to the directory is required. The site’s content is then reviewed by humans. This is the main difference in indexing between a directory and an engine, which uses bots to index sites.
At Intoweb Marketing we take the time to understand your marketing strategy and target audience before we optimize and submit your site and thus ensure that all traffic to your site is relevant to the content. This in turn means higher sales conversions.
The search engines listed below are the most important players on the Internet. You should however, also not overlook the importance of regional and topic specific engines also listed.
Major Players
- Google and Google based AOL, and Netscape
- Yahoo! and Yahoo! based AltaVista and GoodSearch
- Microsoft MSN Search which evolved to Microsoft Live Search in 2006
- Alexa
- Ask.com previously Ask Jeeves
- WiseNut
- Gigablast
Meta Crawlers
Regional Engines
- Baidu geared toward the Asian market
- Google UK
- UKWizz
- UK Best
- Kingdom Search for the UK
- Excite UK
- Yahoo UK
- Ananzi for South Africa
- Araby for the Middle East
- SAPO for Portugal
Job based
- Clickajob for UK
- Recruit.net for the international market
Directories
There are directories for any conceivable topic and country or region. Yahoo however, is the best known directory and provides several regional directories. Just as there are job, regional, and international engines, there are also topic specific indexes for business, health, sport, entertainment, tourism and more. Apart from the above engines, you can also find blog, newsgroup, forum, chat room and people specific engines.
Focus on Google
There are literally thousands of search engines on the Internet. Google is by far the most popular and used by the majority of people because of its functionality, excellent indexing methods, clean appearance and user friendliness. Site optimization and submission should be focused on Google and the other major players first. Secondary consideration should be given to topic specific and regional specific search engines and directories. Contact us to help you optimize your site for maximum visibility as well as relevant submission to ensure that your site gets the exposure it deserves.
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