Search Engines and Directories

You’ve designed a wonderful website, but you may be disappointed with the traffic and sales your site is generating, so you look for a solution. As you research the problem, you’ll find the majority of a website’s traffic comes from search engine and directory referrals — your website may not be getting these referrals. The reason may be that you have not designed your pages correctly for search engine placement or you have not submitted your website correctly with the various search engines and directories (or a little of both).

We all know that it’s sometimes difficult to find what you’re looking for on the World Wide Web. Even when using a search engine or directory service you still need a fairly specific search — if you don’t want a million returns. Your potential customers are in the same predicament. Take the time and make the effort to guarantee that your website is listed well for the keywords that are important to you. Most search engines use spiders to crawl the Web in search for new pages to add to the services database or index. You can wait for one of these spiders to locate your site, go to the search engines’ websites and tell them about your new website, or use one of the many site submission services.

Let’s examine the three different methods used to search the Web: crawler-based search engines (e.g. AlltheWeb), directories (e.g. the Open Directory Project), and a hybrid service (e.g. Yahoo!).