Registering Your Store at Search Engines and Directories
| Billions of searches are performed on search engines each month. According to the Nielsen/NetRatings global index estimates, there are more than 450 million at-home Internet users on the planet. In May 2005, the average user went online 32 times; spent 26 hours, 28 minutes surfing the Internet; visited 65 websites; and viewed 1,203 web pages. The average time spent on one page was 43 seconds. These numbers will only continue to grow as computers become less expensive, broadband connectivity become more widely available, and the Internet becomes more available in other countries. So with more than 5 billion web pages on the Internet and growing, how will consumers find your site? Although you may be competing with a million other web pages, it's not impossible to get top ranking. It sounds logical that every web page would be optimized for search engines, but not everyone is doing it. Also, search engines are constantly changing their formulas on how they rank web pages. Your web page could be number one on a particular keyword search one day and be 100 pages deep the next. It is very important to keep up with the constant changes and continuously work on your search engine optimization and marketing strategy in order to maintain or improve your ranking. So what are the differences between search engines and directories?
Search EnginesA search engine spiders or crawls your site, scans your content, and then indexes your web pages. It's done by specialized software. It scans your website and other pages or sites linked from your site. If you have a link on another website that has been crawled, it is likely your site will also be crawled and indexed. The search engine takes all that information and stores it in a database. So who are the "big dogs" that you need to pay close attention to? The top five search engines account for the majority of the market. You can also submit your site to other search engines, but focusing on the top five will give you the most bang-for-your-buck.
Visit each search engine and read about its policy and procedures on how to submit your site. If you have links pointing to your site, there is a good chance your site has already been crawled and indexed. Before submitting your site, search for your domain name to see whether your site is already listed. You can do this by typing in your URL. DirectoriesA directory is also like a search engine, but the indexing of sites is usually done by humans instead of software. When submitting to a directory, you will be required to identify the appropriate category that your site should be listed under. Directories are kind of like yellow pages. Everything is categorized by the type of business. Consumers who use directories like the fact that they can browse a list of websites under the same category. One of the leading directories is the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org). This particular directory is important because some search engines will actually use your listing in this directory to spider your site. Some search engines will also give you a higher ranking if your site is listed with the Open Directory Project. So don't forget to list your site with the directories even if you have never heard of them:
|
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 149