How search engines work
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The search
engine world is constantly changing, and what worked six months ago may
not work now.
Search engines use a variety of methods to produce search results. These include spiders, paid links, ranking sites by
popularity and partnerships with other search engines. Most big search engines use multiple systems.
Their methods and ranking systems are continually changing, as are their
partnerships with other search engines.
We understand how major search engines operate. We monitor their
(constant) changes, refining how we submit and place your website with
them. And what can be done to your site to help search engines
understand it.
Meta-Tags
Meta-tags are part of the HTML code for a web page,
and are
contained in a part of the page not normally viewable to a web surfer.
They contain
information that search engine use to understand the web site.
This
information includes Title, Description, and Keywords. The better your meta-tags, the better
that search engines can
index your site. The most common mistakes in meta-tags are making
them way too general, and putting the same meta-tag information on every page.
We
write meta-tag information for page each on your site,
using words and phrases that people actually use to find a site like yours, with those
words targeted to the content on that page.
Most big search engines have stopped using
meta tag Keywords to determine what a site is about. This is because the
keywords were abused by webmasters stuffing them with non-relevant phrases.
However the Title, meta tag description, and especially the titles on each
page are still used. Note how this website has the title of the page
clearly at the top. This helps people as well as search
engines understand what the page is about. Seems like a simple
enough idea, however too many websites do not make it easy to
determine what a page is about.
Note: You can view meta-tags for any web page by,
on a PC, doing a right-click on a blank part of the page and then choose "View Source". The
source code for the page will pop up in a new window, and the meta-tag info is
at the top in the <HEAD> area. Try it on this page.
Spiders
Spiders are software programs,
sent by search engines, to your web site. They index all the words
they can find, and use this, and other algorithms to determine what to return to you
when you do a search.
Pay-for-placement
Many major search engines now
charge businesses for submissions, with many methods
and options.. Read our Pay-for-placement article for more on
this.
Indexes
Other sites, like Yahoo and Open
Directory don't use spiders. Instead, an actual
person looks at your site, and decides whether or not to list it.
Yahoo charges $199
per year for businesses to be listed.
Open Directory is staffed by way-overworked volunteers, so it takes time for
listings to appear. It is owned by Netscape/AOL, provides data
free to other search engines, and is important to get listed in. With
the current collapsing of AOL, Open Directory may be left adrift.
Popularity
DirectHit, now owned by Ask Jeeves, pioneered this
approach, which entails
monitoring search engines queries to determine if people clicked-through to
the link, and if so, how long they stayed there.
Google and Teoma (also owned by AskJeeves) use a different technique, and rate sites based on
the number and quality of incoming links . The better the
incoming links, the higher the ranking. Note that this is for incoming
links, not outgoing links. How many outgoing links you have is
irrelevant to search engines. Also, the quality of the links is important, so forget about FFA
sites and link exchanges. Search engines consider such sites to be
spam and mayl penalize you for using them.
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