Search Engine and Directory Optimization

It is your first time on the Internet and you would like some information. Where do you go? There are so many search engine and directory, which one do you start with? Which one is the best? Which of the many search engines really atter?

Well, the best search engines are usually the most popular and most used ones. This will be true for both the website owner as well as the web searcher / consumer. Here is the reason: More often than not, popular search engines tend to promote themselves very well and have strong relations and strategic alliances with other Internet powers, Goole and Yahoo! immediately come to mind. This alone will bring in lots of traffic, especially when compared to the lesser known search engines.

If you are a website owner and your site gets listed high with one of these well-known search engines, you are guaranteed a ton of traffic to your site, a good thing especially since it does not cost you any money!. For the searcher, a well-known (hence, very wealthy and commercially backed) search engine will generally give more dependable and accurate results. These search engines will work faster, load quicker and are more likely to be well maintained and upgraded regularly to keep up with the rapid growth of the internet! Before getting into the specifics of each search engine and directory, let's first define the differences between the two primary types of search services.

Search Engine Optimization Search engines use robots called spiders to index your website. Submit website to a particular search engine and the spider will index your submission. Here is how it works: A spider which is also called a crawler, visits your website, reads your page and then follows links to other pages within your site. This is what is meant when someone says your site has been spidered or crawled. The spider will also return to your site on a timed and regular basis say once every couple months to look for any new changes. Once the spider has all your information, it goes back home to the search engine where it will begin to index what it has found. Most of the time, it can take a while for new pages to be added to the index. Thus, your website may have been spidered but not yet indexed! Until your site has been indexed, you are not yet available for search because your site do not exist yet as far as consumers are concerned. Now, some promotional gurus say that you do not have to actually submit your website to these deep search engines because in theory, these robots are spidering new websites everyday and supposedly they will find and index your site eventually. But the reality is that unless you have links from other sites leading to yours, or you have submited your site with one of these search engines, your website will not be indexed, hence you will never exist! So, there is confusion whether search engine submission is needed or not. My suggestion, it is need to submit your site to search engine in order to index your site faster.

Directory Optimization
Directory will not list your website and will never become aware of your existence unless you submit your website. More often than not, Directory will only register your home page and not your sub pages. To optimizing directory it is important to submit your site by manually in order to make sure that your submission is not consider as spam. The main difference between search engine and directory is that directory will categorize websites. This difference alone will usually make directory more relevant search engine.