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articles
The Scoop on Search Engines
By Theresa Wilkinson, W-edge design
Reprinted with permission from the STC Intercom magazine - January 2001
Volume 48, Issue 1.
Whether you are building a personal Web site to showcase the
oh-so-cute photos of your newborn child or building a corporate Web
site for your company, once the site is complete and launched, you
probably breathe a sigh of relief, thinking your work is done. On
the contrary--that’s when most of your work begins! You need to make
certain that people can find your site. A couple of years ago, I
redesigned a site for a Native American newspaper, the Oklahoma
Indian Times (OKIT), whose old site was getting 6,000 hits a
month. I registered the new site with five search engines, but there
was still a lot I could do to help users find it.
Get Searched
Think of search engines as big phone books: People enter keywords to
be searched for or scroll through directories to find what they’re
looking for. If your site is not registered with a particular search
engine, its users may not find your site. To complicate matters,
there are a lot of search engines out there with varying search
capabilities. It’s up to you to help them locate your site.
A directory groups registered sites into a searchable
categorized listing: A familiar example is Yahoo, whose homepage is
divided into subject topics. Other big ones include LookSmart,
About.com, and NBCi. A database holds information that you
can access through a search query. Both directories and databases
can use robots or spiders to gather information from the Internet.
You can target specific areas within the directories. For example,
when I registered the OKIT site with the Yahoo directory, I told
Yahoo how to categorize my site. So the Yahoo directory includes the
OKIT site under “News and Media/Newspapers/By Region/U.S.
States/Oklahoma,” as well as under “Society and Culture/Cultures and
Groups/Cultures/American/Native American/News and Media/Newspapers.”
Whenever I failed to find a Native American category under the
Society and Culture section of a search engine or directory, I sent
an email politely asking if that category could be added. So if you
don’t find the category you are looking for, ask the directory to
add it. (Your site will be the only one listed in that category, at
least for a while.)
If you don’t believe that registering with search engines will
increase your site’s hits, I am here to tell you it works! Once I
registered the new OKIT site with Yahoo, the hits increased to
20,000 in just two weeks.
Get Crawled
Some directories and databases allow users to perform sophisticated
searches using
deep or general search engines. These engines use a
robot
(also called a spider) program to "crawl" the Internet
searching for new or updated pages. These pages are added to a large
database maintained by the search engine. When a user submits a
search query, the database returns the links to the relevant Web
pages. The quality of the database (and thus the search results)
depends on the sophistication of the robot.
A robot finds pages in two ways: by visiting pages of sites that are
registered with its search engine and by following links on these
pages. The robot visits any subpages connected to the page it's
reading, then visits all the external links on the pages, and so on.
(Note: The robot can follow links on a page providing that the page
is not in frames.) So if your page isn't linked from anywhere else
and you haven't registered it, there's no way it will ever be
found--it will be invisible. You'll want to register with the
major general search engines: AltaVista, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek,
Lycos, MSN search, and Webcrawler. Other search engines to target
include Anzwers, Go2Net (you will pay for listings on this one), and
Northern Light.
I redesigned the OKIT site a couple of times. In the second redesign,
I had around 500 pages on the site. So I placed both sets of site
navigation (side and bottom) into separate HTML files and wrote a
script that called these pages into the main page. This was a great
idea for maintenance--I had to update only one file, instead of
500-plus pages, when I added a new section to the Web site. But the
separate navigation pages cut down on the chances of the search
engine spider crawling the new pages. To increase the chances of the
site getting crawled, I added a "crawler page."
An article I found on the
Webmonkey site
showed me how to create a crawler page--an HTML page listing every
URL I wanted indexed by search engines. I linked the crawler page
from the top of my main page so the spider would find it
immediately. The more URLs you list, the better the chances that
users will find your site.
But there are still more ways to get crawled. Spiders gather
information about a Web site through its TITLE tags, META tags, and
keywords. Confused? Relax. There are a lot of Web sites that teach
you how to deal with all those evil META tags and keywords. It's
easy once you get the hang of it. You might visit the
Art of
Business Web Site Promotion Web site. This site has a tutorial
on how search engines work and how to optimize Web pages for the
best results. It teaches you how to use META tags correctly and how
to register your site with search engines. Another excellent site,
Search Engine Watch (formerly called A Webmaster's Guide To
Search Engines), explains how search engines find and rank Web
pages, with an emphasis on how Webmasters can improve the way search
engines list their Web sites.
A tip that I learned at the Web Design 99 Conference in Atlanta is
that search engines look at TITLE tags first. So put as many of your
keywords as possible in the TITLE tag; of course, the title will
appear on your Web site, so be sure to make it legible and
appealing.
Subject-Specific Search Engines
There are subject-specific search engines, but you have to find
them. Subject-specific search engines are large, highly developed
databases or Internet directories that concentrate in particular
subject areas. Since OKIT features Native American news, issues, and
events, I registered the site with several Native American-specific
search engines, such as www.nativesearch.com.
Some directories and databases catalog selected Web sites and search
engines by subject. The
Directory Guide
lists about 400 directories and search engines in various
categories. You can also try
I-Sleuth and
Beaucoup.
There are services that offer to submit your site to 400 search
engines for a price, but they do not consider the subject matter of
your site. And most of the search engines to which they submit sites
are not often used anyway. I prefer to submit my sites myself--it is
time-consuming but well worth the effort.
Figuring out search engines is not so difficult, and it’s well worth
the effort. All it really takes is doing some homework. By spending
a little time and effort, I increased the hits on the OKIT site from
6,000 to over 170,000 a month.
References
Boutin, Paul. "Sending Search-Engine Traffic to Your Site."
Webmonkey. July 27, 1999.
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