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 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.
- Alexa (free)
- Open Directory (free)