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Search engines overview
It's getting more and more difficult to keep up
with how search engines work and interact, we've outlined below
the information
in a brief guide to what we believe to be correct as of December
2008 and will be updating the details as and when we find
things
have changed. For up to the minute information, please look at
specialist sites like
Webmaster World.
Google
Google is undoubtedly the top dog of search engines and a decent
listing here is without doubt, at the time of writing, one of
the
keys to the success of a site. Listings in Google are free, although
you can pay for AdWords to get immediate traffic. Google will
usually
take up to 6 months to get your site listed, and it appears the
best way to do so is through the Google bot (spider) picking up
on
your
link from another site, spidering (indexing) your site content
and adding it to their database. You can add your URL here
to Google but as it's important to get links in it's advisable
to add your site to dmoz
and even our own store listing.
We recommend avoiding link farms and be wary of companies guaranteeing
instant search engine success.
Google appears to rate sites on a number of aspects, one of the
important ones being the "quality" of in-bound links eg.
a link from Microsoft.com being far more interesting than one from
your neighbor (unless you live next to Bill Gates). Your importance
in Google is measured as "page rank" - to find out the
page rank of a site you'll need to download Google's
tool bar. Here is a very general and unordered list of what
Google is believed to look for on your page:
- Quality incoming links (preferably using your keywords in the
text)
- Keywords in the title
- Keywords in the meta description
- Keywords in the main body of text
- Keywords in the ALT information
- Keywords in the URL
- Descriptive text links within the site
- Internal Link Structure
- Text in <H1> tags
It's important not to overdo things, avoid trying to trick Google,
study high ranking competitor sites without ripping them off and
above all have patience.
Google adwords
You can get into Google immediately through their adword program,
rather than trying to explain it here, you're best getting the information
from the horse's
mouth. The great thing about adwords is that they will get your
site advertised on Google immediately, you can also pay for keywords
that your site is not showing up on, but keep a close eye on what
they are costing you and read the information on optimizing
your ads.
Yahoo
At the time
of
writing the cost of inclusion is $299 - this should get you into
the yahoo directory, and in turn a link for Google to pick up
on
- all in all, probably worth it for an ecommerce site but not as
important as it was in the past.
To add your site to Yahoo, find the category that best suits your
needs and click on the "Suggest a Site" link at the bottom
of the page - make sure you read Yahoo's guidelines
before submitting.
Ask.com
Ask.com should pick up on links from other sites to send
their crawler to yours. You can read their webmaster guidelines
here.
There is also a sponsored listing program with details here.
Yahoo Search Marketing
Yahoo serach marketing is one of the major players
in pay per click - like Google adwords it's a great way to target
your audience and in the same
vein it can work out expensive so it's important to do your research
and check out the competition. You bid on the price
of your keywords and a well targeted campaign can prove very successful
- information
on the program can be located here.
Other search engines and directories
Here's a list of other places to submit your site, some are free
and some are paid inclusions - it's also worth doing a search to
find directories of sites that are industry related or regional,
but again avoid using free for all link farms - you are likely to
get more spam than trade, and may even be penalised by the major
players.
Please let us know if you find any broken links or price changes.
We try to keep our information updated regularly and of course appreciate
any feedback.
We have more information on optimizing
your site for search engines and our own search
engine friendly features.
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