- Introduction
- Step 1
Preparation - Step 2
Content - Step 3
Offline Advertising - Step 4
Online Classified and Directories - Step 5
Online Listing Sites - Step 6
Search Engines - Step 7
Optimization
Step 6 – Search Engines
A search engine is an Internet-based programme that allows users to search and retrieve specific information from the World Wide Web. Basically it searches web-based documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found.
There are two types of search engine: those that are powered by robots, also referred to as crawlers, spiders or bots and those that are powered by human submissions.
Crawler-based Search Engines such as Google use automated software agents (Spiders or Bots) that visit a website. They navigate through the website’s coding, read information on the site itself, read the site's Meta Tags and strategic fields, and follow the links that the site connects to and performs indexing on all linked websites as well (inbound linking).
The spider returns all that information back to a data centre, where the data is indexed using advanced algorithms. The ‘spider’ then periodically returns to the site to check for any information that has been altered or added. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the administrators of the search engine.
Human-powered Search Engines rely on people to submit information that is subsequently indexed and catalogued. Only information that is submitted is put into the index. This is similar if not exactly like the original search engine databases and this technology still has a place in certain situations when trying to focus on specialised information.
If you wanted to say there was a third type of search engine you could… these are a hybrid of robot/crawler-based and human powered.
For your online marketing the importance of appearing higher up search engine listings is paramount… the higher the better. This is where a little research is needed to plan the strategy of optimising your website with as many of the Search Engines as possible.
IndependentOwners™.com automatically submit your domain name with the major Search Engines e.g. Google, Yahoo etc. but there are many 100’s of Search Engines and you should dedicate some time to registering with as many as possible to ensure that your website appears as prominently as possible.
Please be aware that submitting a website to a search engine does not necessarily mean it will be picked up immediately. URL’s are added by IndependentOwners.com to Yahoo and Google respectively at:
On submission Google state the following – “We add and update new sites to our index each time we crawl the web, and we invite you to submit your URL here. We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.” And Yahoo similarly say – “Note that in the effort to maximize the quality of search results that appear on Yahoo! and our other distribution partners, we do not add every submitted URL to our search index. Therefore we cannot make predictions or guarantees about whether your URL will appear as a search result.”