Submitting your site to the search engines is a pain, make nomistake. But with a top twenty listing on Webcrawler alonehaving the capability to bring 50 visitors a day to your pagesit’s a pain that is worth suffering.There are a great number of search engines around, but only thetop 15 or so really generate serious traffic for most sites.Many of the lessersearch engines are ‘meta search’ types, meaning they actually gettheir results from the bigger engines anyway.Of the main engines, there are two categories – Directory based,and Spidered based.The Directory based (which includes Yahoo, Looksmart and Siteswisethe OpenDirectory Project) are generally added by hand. This means aneditor for the chosen category looks at your site and awards it aposition (or not) based on how he/she rated it.The Spider index types, (including Lycos, Inktomi and AltaVista)use robot browsers to check and index the sites based onpre-programmed criteria.In general, to get a good listing in the Directory engines meansyou must impress the editor with the look, ease of navigation andcontent of your site. Make sure your first page loads veryquickly (empty your browser cache before checking) as this is animportant factor. If your ‘front’ page doesn’t open within 10 -15 seconds you will not get a high placement. If need be, createa simple ‘Welcome’ page that opens quickly and use it as a frontdoor to your site with the more graphic laden pages with in it.With Directory engines, if you have midis on your page be sureyou include an “off ” control. You will be penalized if not.Don’t over do images or clutter – the editors read hundreds ofthese sites a day and will be likely to have a lot in the queuebehind you. They want to judge your site rather than your tastein art or cartoons and music selections.Spider based engines are more predictable. Spiders scan yourpages looking for your keywords, count the number of times thekeyword occurs through out that page, and measure it against theoverall length of your text to calculate how relevant your siteis to the keyword.
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