When I started my e-business, I ask my web-designer friend to make a site
which is really brainstorming. He did me a great favor and really made an
excellent site. My site's design is fabulous, it's graphics are mind blowing and
coding is superb. But now what? What I seen in the coming days, I am not earning
a single penny because no one is visiting my site.
I think for a while that why all this is happening, then I make a search on
Yahoo and see the first site which is coming on the top. It doesn't have a good
design like mine but still he is making good money. Then I came to know that the
site's design is meaningless if site's ranking on search engines is not good.
When it comes to search engine every ear just not hears it but listens it's
every aspect and try to locate it's presence in his site. Well why not it be
done as it is the place from where all of us get our business.
Every search engine has it's own criterion of ranking and it's clear from the
fact that when you do a search on Yahoo or Google or any other search engines
there results vary. Here is the listing of some of the Top Search Engines and a
few noteworthy points about all of them. Know which engines get you more bangs
for the buck?
Google
Google has increased in popularity tenfold the past several years. They have
gone from beta testing, to becoming the Internet's largest index of web pages in
a very short time. Their spider, affectionately named "Googlebot", crawls the
web and provides updates to Google's index about once a month.
Google.com began as an academic
search engine. Google, by far, has a very good algorithm of ranking pages
returned from a result, probably one of the main reasons it has become so
popular over the years. Google has several methods which determine page rank in
returned searches.
Yahoo
Yahoo! is one of the oldest web directories and portals on the Internet
today, and the site went live in August of 1994. Yahoo! is a 100% human edited
directory, and provides secondary search results using Google.
Yahoo! is also one of the largest traffic generators around, as far as web
directories and search engines go. Unfortunately, however, it is also one of the
most difficult to get listed in, unless of course you pay to submit your site.
Even if you pay it doesn't guarantee you will get listed.
Either way, if you suggest a URL, it is "reviewed" by a Yahoo! editor, and if
approved will appear in the next index update.
AltaVista
Many who have access to web logs may have seen a spider named 'scooter'
accessing their pages. Scooter used to be AltaVista's robot. However, since the
Feb 2001 site update, a newer form of Scooter is now crawling the web. Whichever
spider AltaVista uses, it is one of the largest search engines on the net today,
next to Google.
It will usually take several months for AltaVista to index your entire site,
although the past few months scooter hasn't been deep crawling too well. Unlike
Google, AltaVista will only crawl and index 1 link deep, so it takes a good
amount of time to index your site depending on how large your site is.
AltaVista gets most of its results from its own index, however they do pull
the top 5 results of each search from Overture (formerly Goto).
Inktomi
Inktomi's popularity grew several years ago as they powered the secondary
search database that had driven Yahoo. Since then, Yahoo as switched to using
Google as their secondary search and backend database, however Inktomi is just
as popular now, as they were several years ago, if not more so.
Their spiders are named "Slurp", and different versions of Slurp crawls the
web many different times throughout the month, as Inktomi powers many sites
search results. There isn't much more to Inktomi then that. Slurp puts heavy
weight on Title and description tags, and will rarely deep crawl a site. Slurp
usually only spider’s pages that are submitted to its index.
Inktomi provides results to a number of sites. Some of these are America
Online, MSN, Hotbot, Looksmart, About, Goto, CNet, Geocities, NBCi, ICQ and many
more.
Lycos
Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the Internet today, next to
Altavista and Yahoo. Their spider, named "T-Rex", crawls the web and provides
updates to the Lycos index from time to time. The FAST crawler provides results
for Lycos in addition to its own database.
The Lycos crawler does not weigh META tags too heavily, instead it relies on
its own ranking algorithm to rank pages returned in results. The URL, META
title, text headings, and word frequency are just a few of the methods Lycos
uses to rank pages. Lycos does support pages with Frame content. However, any
page that isn't at least 75 words in content is not indexed.
Excite
Excite has been around the web for many years now. Much more of a portal than
just simply a search engine, Excite used to be a fairly popular search engine,
until companies such as Google seemed to have dominated the search engine
market. As of recently, Excite no longer accepts submissions of URL's, and
appears to no longer spider. To get into the Excite search results, you need to
be either listed with Overture or Inktomi.
Looksmart
Getting a listed with Looksmart could mean getting a good amount of traffic
to your site. Looksmart's results appear in many search engines, including
AltaVista, MSN, CNN, and many others.
Looksmart has two options to submit your site. If your site is generally
non-business related, you can submit your site to Zeal (Looksmart's sister
site), or if you are a business, you can pay a fee to have your site listed.
Either method will get you listed in Looksmart and its partner sites if you are
approved.
Once you have submitted your site, and it is approved for listing it will
take up to about 7 days for your site to be listed on Looksmart and its partner
sites.
AOL Search
America Online signed a multiyear pact with Google for Web search results and
accompanying ad-sponsored links, ending relationships with pay-for-performance
service Overture Services and Inktomi, its algorithmic search provider of nearly
three years.
Ok, now you have got a better understanding of search engine’s game and
finally you come to know which search engine is best for you and which one is
leading in today's Internet World. In nutshell, the thing which every
e-entrepreneur wants is Top Search Engine Ranking. Isn't it right? So take some
time to register with these search engines as soon as possible and watch the
traffic grow.
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