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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Lesson 4


It is estimated that you can generate anywhere from 20% to 60% of your business online from search engines. With more than 100,000,000 web pages in existence you need to learn how search engines work and how your e-business website can get placed in the top 20 of all search results.

Search engines are a very powerful tool in marketing your e-business if a search puts your website in the top 50 results. They are absolutely useless if your website gets listed further down.

The three main types of search engines are directories, indexing search engines and META search engines.

Directories


A directory is also called a category database. A directory is a listing of category subject headings with websites listed under these specific categories. You browse through the categories until you find what you are looking for. A directory will not list your URL and will never become aware of your website until you register with them.

When listing your website in a directory, you are generally allowed to enter the description and keywords for your website exactly as you would like them to appear.

Indexing Search Engines


Search engines are also called carolers, spiders, robots, and worms. They automatically index websites using indexing software or indexing robots. The complexity of the software will determine the way they perform. Here are some of the characteristics of search engines:

  1. Search engines will index the web page (not the entire website) that you give them.

  2. They will index every word of every page on a website.

  3. They visit external links and crawl though the web looking for any new websites, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They go from URL to URL until they have visited every website that can be found on the Internet.

When you tell the search engine what your URL is, its software will go there automatically and index everything it needs. Every search engine has different criteria for the results that it returns. Search engines change their algorithms very regularly so there is no guarantee that your website will always be prominently listed.

META Search Engines


These search engines perform searches on multiple indexing search engines simultaneously. Here, your ranking for a keyword is calculated by the combined ranking of all the search engines simultaneously used. The way to getting ranked high is to make sure you are listed in all the search engines used by META search engines. It is not necessary to submit your website to META search engines as they use the results of other major search engines.

Positioning


When a search is conducted for a keyword, the search engine retrieves a list of related web pages and displays them in a "relevancy" or "best-match order". The websites that get the highest ranking are the ones with pages that best match the keyword. This is why it is extremely important to select your keywords with extreme care. Your web page will get ranked higher if you use good keywords, use keywords in the title of the page, and you use keywords in the META tags and body text.