By far the largest quantity of new traffic you'll receive will come via search engines and directories. Once listed you'll need to find a way of getting your site higher in the listings than similar sites and those of your competitors.
This section of Webmastertech is divided into five sections - click the book-marks below to go to the relevant part.
Search Engines
- What are they and how do they work?
Search Engine Ranking
- The dreaded algorithms and the dance!
Keywords & Metatags
- How they control your destiny
Improving Your Rank
- Advice, Sites and Software
Submission Sites
- Google, Yahoo, Overture, Inktomi...
Search Engines and Directories
Search engines are big old pieces of software called spiders and bots running on huge great servers out there in the ether that go round the internet following links and logging the web-sites they come across. The directories have the same 'feel' but are big, very big, databases of the results from the search engines.
To complicate things still further there are many hybrid services which refer to a search engine, but have access to a directory to speed up results in much the same fashion as the internet cache in your PC's browser. To simplify things we're going to treat engines and directories as the same entity and below we'll refer to them as search engines.
Depending on pre-defined criteria such as popularity and relevance of your site's content, the lists resulting from a query will prioritise the most successful site addresses to the top of the list. You need that to be you.
Search Engine Ranking
The search engines and directories have one principle in common - they want to respond to a user's search query with the most relevant and professional results. They therefore 'rank' sites in order of importance according to how popular the sites are and the content's relevance to the keywords submitted.
Popularity is mainly judged by the number of web-sites which link to yours - including other directories and search engines. The engines search other directories because they are web-sites, they just don't care. You'll notice a snow-ball effect as you submit your site. As your site's presence hits critical mass, other engines will find your site faster than you can submit it. A nice place to be.
Relevance is judged by the keywords (below) and the text content of your pages. The more text you have and the more often a relevant keyword is mentioned in your site the higher it will appear in the list of search results for that particular query. Repetition isn't the answer as the software has got smarter and looks for duplication.
Sometimes it's advisable to tell the bots/spiders what to do and which folders to explore and which to ignore - read all about it in :
The Robots.txt File explained...
Google Information For Webmasters How to submit your URL to the king of the engines, what to do about index problems, and so much more!
Google Dance Page Check out your site's rank on the Google Dance machine in WWW, WWW1, WWW2 and all seven data centres if you're getting hooked....
SearchEngineWatch.com is an authoritative guide to how search engines work. The site offers both free information to the general public and premium content to paying members.
Keywords & Metatags
The header tags 'keywords', 'description', and 'title', are all important here. Many engines index your pages based on the keywords, and whether these keywords are repeated in your content. The description and/or the title tags are used to give the descriptive blurb that appears below your address in the search results page.
Get your tags right and you're halfway there. Our own tip is once you've hit on the right combination, copy your tags into a word document so you can copy and paste during the submission phase below. It can be pretty demoralising typing the same info into form fields in the search sites, and they nearly all want the same input. Copy and paste your way to sanity!
Internet Business Promoter Internet Business Promoter (IBP) is a new search engine friendly ranking tool that helps you to keep track of your search engine rankings. It also contains a professional keyword density analyzer that helps you to get higher rankings for your web pages.
Search Engine Optimisation Page 2
