Jeff Gilman

Design your web site to get registered with search engines

The truth is there are only a few ... at the top of a list of search engine results and getting to the top is not easy, ... or ... With one ... – pay for it – but more on t

The truth is there are only a few positions at the top of a list of search engine results and getting to the top is not easy, guaranteed, or dependable. With one exception – pay for it – but more on that later. Let me explain how search engines work because meeting their expectations is what the really important stuff is all about.

First, there are 4 major players in the answer-a-search biz. Microsoft has about 24 million unique users, Yahoo and AOL each with about 20 million, and Google with about 10 million. Throw in Netscape and you reach about 100 million people. All the other engines are just chump change. If you can get properly placed on these engines you are in front of most potential customers and can look forward to an early retirement. Knowing what these engines look for is the key to getting registered and found.

These engines get their listings in a couple of different ways. You may submit your site directly to them, you may pay them for an enhanced listing, and/or you may pay for a third party service that pays for, or is paid for, space on the engine’s result listings. The below table explains the various services and fees from the big engines.

Content Management at Selected Engines


Free Listings Provided By
Enhanced Listing for Fee Provided By
Third Party Listings Come From

Microsoft

www.msn.com
Commercial sites may be submitted at no charge for inclusion in the Web Pages section of MSN Search. Sites in the Web Pages section will be ranked below sites that are submitted via the paid submission service and will not be included in the MSN directory. There is no guarantee of acceptance or turnaround time for these submissions.
Listings provided by Look Smart
Same as enhanced



Yahoo

www.yahoo.com


Yahoo! does not charge for any listings in the Yahoo! Directory. Yahoo! only charges for expedited reviews of web sites submitted for inclusion.


Yahoo! Express (expedited review) is part of a suite of services that Yahoo! created to service small business needs.
Sponsor Matches are paid listings provided by Overture Services, Inc.



AOL

www.aol.com
AOL Search is a hierarchical Web directory, organized by subject. All user-submitted Web content is maintained by the Open Directory Project (http://www.dmoz.org). The Open Directory Project is run by a staff of volunteer editors who choose to evaluate and classify Web sites in one or more categories. The editor exercises the option of choosing to add a site, moving sites between categories and creating new sites.
Google
Open Directory Project

Google

www.google.com
Only the top-level page from a host is necessary; you do not need to submit each individual page. The crawler, Googlebot, will be able to find the rest. Google updates its index on a regular basis, so updated or outdated link submissions are not necessary. Dead links will 'fade out' of our index on our next crawl when we update our entire index.
Google
None

Netscape

www.netscape. com
AOL Search is a hierarchical Web directory, organized by subject. All user-submitted Web content is maintained by the Open Directory Project (http://www.dmoz.org). [Same as AOL]
AOL
AOL


When your URL comes to the attention of one of these engines they will come and visit you. Yahoo sends live paid people. Open Directory uses volunteers. Others use web crawlers or spiders to crawl around your web site and this is important because spiders are the other way you get registered – automatically and without having to ask for it. It is perfectly possible to get a listing merely because your URL is on a site visited by a spider. This, by the way, is one of the reasons you want links to you on other sites. Regardless of how they visit you, all engines are all seeking to classify you. Whether you like being labeled or not, they must label you in a meaningful fashion.

The volunteers, spiders, flunkies, and even paid submitters do this with descriptions and key words contained on your site. And they find these key words and descriptions in two places – meta tags and text on the web pages themselves. So you need to have both.

Meta tags (meta is Greek for denoting position – which is probably fair because this sounds like Greek to most people) are computer codes buried in the HTML text of a web page. They aren’t visible on a web page but can often be seen by viewing the source code of a web page. To see source code, click on a web page – not the graphic stuff but some text or a blank area – with the right hand mouse button and select View Source. The tags are at the top of the page and look like this: