Which Search Engines ? There are so many out there…..

Search Engines you need to worry about

Ever stumble to a software or a company claiming “able to submit to 3000+ search engines”? Probably the best advise is to just ignore them. What they are trying to do is to confuse us. Their claim is just another sales pitch:

• There are only a handful of genuine search engine, probably less than 50 of them. This is the one really go crawling on each website on the net, read and assess the content and give the ranking based on certain algorithm
• There are more of meta search engine, probably several hundreds of them.This is the one just get your search term / keyword, pass it to the genuine search engine, and then pass the result back to you.
• Then there are what called directory, probably several thousands of them. Automatic or manual, this is the one list our website on certain categories that they have.

When people say “submit to 3000+ search engine”, they mix all 3 categories above. But what we really need to focus on is just the first category: the genuine search engine. Because this search engine is the one being used by our potential customer to find our website. So don’t get trapped to the false security knowing “Oh, my website has been submitted to 3000 search engine/directory” – most of the time it will do nothing or just very little to make our website ranked higher on the search engine

Search Engines Shortlist: They are important

Let’s focus on the real search engine ! Who is the big boys? Here is the list:

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

• Only 4 genuine search engine that we need to focus on: Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask
• Only by submitting website to search engine will give little or no help to achieve high ranking

Previously published on 2008 by the same author, stat data updated.

1. Search Engine Friendly

The easier our website to be read by search engine, the higher the rank

We need to always stick it in our mind, search engine did not send somebody to actually see our website and read all the content one by one. They will have a computer program that cutely called ‘crawler’, ‘spider’ or ‘bot’ (for robot) to read the content of our website. So, the color composition or type of font that we choose for our website to make it more beautiful probably does not matter at all.

(But they will penalize you if you put a text with the same color for both text color and background color. This is commonly done by spammer to fill the website with the keyword without wanting to be seen by human visitor)

Several item that matters

• better use text than image for your content. Although for human it is easier to have images to illustrate something, the content of the image can not be read by search engine
• better use text/html based  than flash based website. Although it is still possible to make your flash based website got high rank, but it is generally will be more difficult for flash based website to get read properly.
• search engine cannot go to password protected area

2. Website Relevancy

The more relevant the content of our website with reference to the keywords, the higher the rank

Say our website is about digital camera photography then you cannot expect to get high rank if someone search for “car mechanics”.

Well, we don’t want that to happen either, right ? We only want motivated buyer. The one that most likely to buy ! But on the other hand, you might think, how about just put 1000 times words “digital camera” on the website that will be more relevant? WRONG, this is called “spamming”. If we spam the keyword, not only the website deemed to be NOT RELEVANT, our website also get penalized because of spamming , hence will received very low ranking that it should be. Don’t do this ! The search engine will ‘smart enough’ to know whether the sites is relevant to the keywords or not.

3. Website Popularity

The more popular our website, the higher the rank

How do we measure popularity in real live ? Am I more popular than Bob ? Not really straightforward isn’t it ? Luckily for a website, search engine has elegant solution:

The more people see our website the more popular it is

• How do they know? All major search engine have that ‘toolbar’ that sitting on your browser. The toolbar can send some information to let the search engine knows which website you go (Yes, you may disable this). Also they may have monitor the popularity from the search result.
• Our website is deemed to be more popular if more of other website put a direct link to our website.
• Having know this people has abused this factor. Imagine you just deal with 100 other website that we put our link on our website and they will put their link to our website and suddenly our website become “popular”. Unfortunately, the one that count is “one way link”. If a website link back to the website that link to them, it doesn;t count. This way, only real popular one will ranked higher. We cannot really make it up.

And also there are some fine detail that probably we need to know such as:

• a link is from relevant website will score higher than from non-relevant website. for example: our website is about digital camera, then a link from digital camera reviewer will be more valuable than link from local chemist a friend of yours…
• a link from more popular website will score higher than from less popular website. for example: if CNN website put a link to your website, it will score higher than a link from your new second website (that you just finish).That’s mean if you think to open 1000 brand new website that give one way link to one of your website, you can just forget this method. It will be close to worthless

Well all the key principles above just there to make sure nobody abuse the search engine for their own gain. In order to make our website highly rank on the search engine, we cannot abuse the principle. We can only make our website aligned with the principle – or at least: not against the principle – and the rest is up to the search engine.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

We need to make sure it is search engine friendly so it can get ranked properly

• Relevancy and Popularity of our website will produce higher ranking
• Abuse or misuse of these principle will cause our website to get the penalty
• Search engine ranking is basically a popularity contest.

Previously published on 2008 by the same author.