ITFT - Search engine

Search Engines

WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE

Definition:

A place, on the Net, where one goes to find sites about specific information. When you have a Web site and you want people to be able to find it you must go to the search engines and submit your site to them so they will list it.

After you submit your site to them it still may take as long as 3 months before they list it. You may need to re-submit your site every couple months depending on the rules of the search engine. Read each of their rules before submitting.

Examples:

I'm going to submit my Web site to search engines so other people can find it.

Why use a search engine?

• Finding information on the Internet

• Ranked by relevance

– search term (key words)‏

– weighted by appearance and placement of key words.

• Ranked by Popularity – Google, Direct Hit

• Ranked by $$$

– Overture, Looksmart (Looklistings)‏

Who are they? • There are NOT 300,000

search engines!

• The TOP 8: 1. Yahoo

2. Google

3. MSN

4. AOL

5. Altavista

6. Go Network (Infoseek)‏

7. Lycos

8. Excite

represent 88.86% of all search engines.

• What SE do you use?

Get a flood of

traffic to your

website !

Submit your site to

300,000 search

engines

only $58 !!!!

Anatomy of a SE Optimisation Project

1. Determine Key Words

2. Submit to Directories

3. Get Links

4. Optimise Web Pages

5. Submit to Spider Engines

1. Determine Keywords

• What are people actually searching for?

– Don’t focus on “Business Name”

– Research using objective tools e.g. Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com)‏

• Choose popular, relevant, non-competitive keywords.

• Weave those terms into your pages.

What are people searching for?

Research using www.wordtracker.com Initial keyword = asthma

1. Determine Keywords ...

Keyword Count- 24hrs

asthma 6688

womens health 4892

mens health 3427

health information 2997

allergies 2461

health care 1884

food allergies 1154

asthma symptoms 710

asthma pictures 543

asthma in children 408

asthma treatment 330

asthma information 311

asthma cause 263

exercise induced asthma 203

asthma medication 182

childhood asthma 140

asthma attacks 133

Choose your Keywords

• Theme Related

• Popular

• Low Competition (use wordtracker or observe

number of results when you search)‏

1. Determine Keywords …

What are people Searching for?

Put your keywords in...

For Directories:

– Category

– Title

– Description

– Domain name

1. Determine Keywords …

What are people Searching for?

Directory example...

1. Determine Keywords …

What are people Searching for?

Category

Title

Description

2. Submit to Directories

1. ODP (open directory project)‏

2. Looksmart via ZEAL

3. Yahoo!

4. Relevant industry portals

3. Get Links

Q: How?

1. Freely distribute articles with in-built links to your website.

2. Use keywords in the link text rather than organisation name or domain name

3. Ask to be linked in their links/resources page

4. Offer reciprocal links

5. Submit link pages to Google

Q: Why?

A: Link Popularity and

referred traffic

Link Text

Put your keywords in...

For Spider Engines: – <title>

– <Meta> description

– Headings <h1><h2>

– Body text

– Link text

– Domain name

<meta> keywords are a low priority

Don’t over-do it!

4. Optimise your pages

SE’s love standard HTML but stumble over….

• Frames (use the <noframes> tag to insert content)‏

• Flash

• Lots of Javascript

• Dynamic pages (generated from a database) particularly containing special characters like ? = &

• Images containing text (the S.E can’t read the text in the image)‏

4. Optimise your pages

5. Submit to the Spider Engines

Submit base domain only to:

– Google

– All The Web

– Lycos

Submit individual pages to: – Alta Vista (www.altavista.com.au, free or express

service)‏

– Inktomi (www.positiontech.com US$39 +$25/page pa)‏

Refer to handout for other engines and directories

5. Monitor your position

• Review website statistics

– Many hosting companies provide, or

– Free stats from www.sitemeter.com

– Look for “referrals”

– Throw away your “hit counter”

• Check your rankings

– Top Dog (www.topdog.com US$199)‏

– Web Position Gold (www.web-position-gold.biz US$149), mostly US engines