In order
to do business on the Internet, people (customers) must be able to find you. One way that
process is accomplished is through search engines. The task of "publishing" your
site to many search engines is in itself, a profession. The ability to do that well
is the difference between a fair online store and a very good one.
Search engines are a database, or index that can be queried to help you find information on the World Wide Web.
Google is now the main search engine but there are many smaller ones.
While often directories,
guides and listing services are often called search engines, they in fact do maintain publicly
searchable databases that can be searched. For that reason, we generally categorize them with
search engines. However, the primary difference is that they do NOT go out to the Internet and
search for pages to put in the database. The pages must be brought to them. An example of this
is Yahoo (which stands for "Yet
Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle.")
There are also niche, or specialty search
engines, that only search for one item, one business, one vertical market, thing
or service. As a general rule, these are most often better at what they do than a
general search engine. There are also local search engines that only search and find things on one site.
There are roughly 2400 known, reasonably good or better, search engines, guides and
directories; about 300 are considered extremely useful while about 20 are major and
get the lion's share of use. Most do one sort or search better than others.
It is important
to get your site in as many search engines as possible. Many will eventually find your
site when they spider, or search, the web without any effort on your part though you may
not get any visitors to your site for a very long time this way.
Each search engine has
different criteria for how they include a site in their data base and what makes it come
up when a request is made by someone entering a search term. Certain components in a web
page will get you banned from some engines and even some words can get you an unfavourable
listing. On the other hand certain things will increase your chances of getting in and
coming up in searches. One of these is the title of your web pages.
Just the number of words, what words are used and the order they are
in can make a difference on how your sites ranks in search engines.
The big thing with search engines now is pay for click - some no longer even accept free listings.
Paying for traffic will get traffic to your site from day one but it can get very expensive. Depending on the keywords
you need to pay for you must be willing to payout a minimum of $100 a week which may not be feasible for you. Some sites pay out $1,000's
per day to bring buyers to their sites.
Free listings on the other hand take time to generate traffic. Even if you
opt for the pay per click route you should still get in the generic or free listings. If pay per click is out of the question for you, and it is for many small businesses,
it is more crucial than ever to be sure your web site, especially the front page, is optimised for search engines.
