Introduction
This document gives an overview
of how search engines work and how we can work together to support our local
businesses on being found through the web-abyss of the Internet.
Our primary way to get people
to find your site is by using television, radio, newspapers, and flyers to
promote your business. We do this
by direct and indirect advertising. Direct
advertising is where we directly promote your business while indirect
advertising is where we promote our LocalBiz.com site so that people will visit
our site and find your business. Our
LocalBiz site is the primary search place for potential customers to visit, and
then, only find your business while searching for products and services on the
Internet.
We also are submitting your
site and our site to the popular web search engines so that when someone
searches for products and services within our geographical location, they will
find your site. Unfortunately this
latter way of getting indexed on these popular search engines can take some time
and resources. However, by
understanding how these search engines work, and by working together, we can
make it so that our sites get indexed more quickly and we get ranked higher in
these popular search engines.
What are Search Engines?
Internet search engines are
special sites on the Web that are designed to help people find information
stored on other sites. There are differences in the ways various search engines
work, but they all perform three basic tasks:
-
They
search the Internet -- or select pieces of the Internet -- based on
important words.
-
They
keep an index of the words they find, and where they find them.
-
They
allow users to look for words or combinations of words found in that index.
Early search engines held an index of a few hundred thousand
pages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousand inquiries each day.
Today, a top search engine will index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond
to tens of millions of queries per day.
How Search Engines Work?
A search engine finds
information for its database by accepting listings sent in by authors wanting
exposure, or by getting the information from their "Web crawlers,"
"spiders," or "robots," programs that roam the Internet
storing links to and information about each page they visit. Web crawler
programs are a subset of "software agents," programs with an unusual
degree of autonomy that perform tasks for the user. How do these really work? Do
they go across the net by web address one by one? Do they store all or most of
everything on the Web?
Search engines use software
robots called spiders, which comb the Internet to survey the Web looking for
documents and their Web addresses to build their databases. These Web documents
are retrieved and indexed. When you enter a query at a search engine
website, your input is checked against the search engine's keyword indices. The
best matches are then returned to you as hits.
According to The WWW Robot
Page, these spiders normally start with a historical list of links, such as
server lists, and lists of the most popular or best sites, and follow the links
on these pages to find more links to add to the database. This makes most
engines, without a doubt, biased toward more popular sites. A Web crawler could
send back just the title and web-addresses of each page it visits, or just some
of the descriptive information about the page, or it could send back the entire
text of each page.
It seems unfair, but developers
aren't rewarded much by location services for sending in the URLs of their pages
for indexing. The typical time from sending your URL in to getting it into the
database seems to be 6-8 weeks. Not only that, but a submission for one of my
sites expired very rapidly, no longer appearing in searches after a month or
two, apparently because I didn't update it often enough. Most search engines
check their databases to see if URLs still exist and to see if they are recently
updated. Also, after your
submission has become active it will take some time before your pages rank
higher on the list. This is because
you are competing against sites, which might have been around for years.
In other words, a higher ranking just takes time (up to a year) and can
be assisted by getting many people to link to your site and advertising your
site.
Popular Search Engines
Yahoo! is the original search
engine, and still the most popular way to access the World Wide Web. Although,
at root, it is a directory, Yahoo! has linked with Google's search engine to
take over when it cannot find what you are looking for internally. This creates
a list of Categories that match your search-words, then a list of web sites,
followed by web pages from Google. It works well when searching for
companies.
Google
claims to have the largest number of sites indexed. They only return those pages
that include all of your search terms making for more relevant results -
a necessity with such a large database.
AltaVista
is a true search engine. It searches for words on the page and seems to give no
preference to page titles. They match some of your search words, not
necessarily all, and the results are not always very relevant,
unfortunately.
Get More Hits By Understanding Search Engines
Knowing just the little bit
about the above can give you ideas of how to give your page more exposure.
Hustle for Links
Most software spiders find your
site by links from other pages. Even if you have sent in your URL, your site can
be indexed longer and ranked higher in search results if many links lead to your
site. One of my sites that couldn't show up in the most casual search got most
of its hits from links on other sites. Links can be crucial in achieving good
exposure. We are cross-linking our
site and of course we link to your site.
If you have any friends, business owners, or vendors that we can link to
your site, this will also help.
Submit Your URL to Multi-Database Pages
It is best to use a
multiple-database submission service such as SubmitIt!, which can be found at
http://www.submit-it.com to save you the time of contacting each search service
separately. We are using software
to submit your site but if you can also submit your site, the ranking will go up
and it will become indexed sooner in the search engines.
Remember, it takes 6-8 weeks to become indexed.
Advertise Your Site
We are using direct and
indirect advertising to promote your site and to get people to come and visit
your site. Most search engines rate
sites by how popular it is, how often it is getting hit, and how many links go
to your site. By putting a sign in
your window or adding your web address to your regular advertising, your site
will gain popularity and thus get ranked higher on the search engines.
Note once again that this takes time.
Summary
Hopefully this document has
answered some of your questions about search engines and how to get your site
found in them. We are committed to
getting our customers submitted in the popular search engines and to help
support locally owned businesses through the use of the Internet.
Please contact us with any questions you may have about search engines. |
