There are many more examples of relevancy indicators a spider considers when visiting your page, such as the proximity of important words to the beginning of the page. Here, as well, the spider does not necessarily see the same things a human visitor would see. For instance, a left-hand menu pane on your Web page. People visiting your site will generally not first pay attention to this, focusing instead on the main section. The spider, however, will read your menu before passing to the main content – simply because it is closer to the beginning of the code.

Remember: during the first visit, the spider does not yet know which words your page relates to! Keep in mind this simple truth. By reading your HTML code, the spider (which is just a computer program) must be able guess the exact words that make up the theme of your site.

Then, the spider will compress your page and create the index associated with it. To keep things simple, you can think of this index as an enumeration of all words found on your page, with several important parameters associated with each word: their proximity, frequency, etc.

Certainly, no one really knows what the real indices look like, but the principals are as they have been outlined here. The words that are high in the list according to the main criteria will be considered your keywords by the spider. In reality, the parameters are quite numerous and include off-page factors as well, because the spider is able to detect the words every other page out there uses when linking to your page, and thus calculate your relevance to those terms also.

When a Web surfer queries the search engine, it pulls out all pages in its database that contain the user’s query. And here the ranking begins: each page has a number of “on-page” indicators associated with it, as well as certain page-independent indicators (like PageRank). A combination of these indicators determines how well the page ranks.

It’s important to keep this in mind: after you have made your page attractive for visitors, ask yourself whether you have also made it readable for the search engine spiders. In the lessons that follow, we will provide for you detailed insight into the optimization procedure; however, try to keep in mind the basics you’ve learned here, no matter how advanced you become.

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The first thing to remember is that the search engines rank “pages”, not “sites”. What this means is that you will not achieve a high ranking for your site by attempting to optimize your main page for ten different keyword phrases. However, different pages of your site WILL appear up the list for different key phrases if you optimize each page for just one of them. If you can’t use your keyword in the domain name, no problem – use it in the URL of some page within your site, e.g. in the file name of the page. This page will rise in relevance for the given keyword. All search engines show you URLs of specific PAGES when you search – not just the root domain names like http://lilacor.com/ but the paths like http://lilacor.com/about/.

Second, understand that the search engines do not see the graphics and JavaScript dynamics your page uses to captivate visitors. You can use a graphic image of written text that says you sell beautiful Christmas gifts. But it does not tell the search engine that your website is related to Christmas Gifts – unless you use an ALT attribute where you write about it.

Here’s an example to illustrate.

What the visitor sees:

What the search engine will read in this place:

<img src=”http://lilacor.com/images/1.png” width=”250″ height=”100″ class=”image” />

As you see there’s nothing in the code which could tell the search robots that the content relates to “Christmas”, “Gifts”, or “Beautiful”. The situation will change if we rewrite the code like this:

<img src=”http://lilacor.com/images/1.png” width=”250″ height=”100″ class=”image” alt=”Beautiful Gifts Image!!!” />

As you can see we’ve added the ALT attribute with the value that corresponds to what the image tells your visitors. Initially, the “alt” attribute was meant to provide alternative text for an image that for some reason could not be shown by the visitor’s browser. Nowadays it has acquired one more function – to bring the same message to the search engines that the image itself brings to human Web surfers.

The same concerns the usage of JavaScript. Look at these two examples:

1.    Visit our page about discounted Samsung Monitors!

2.    <script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”><!–document.write(“Visit our page about ” + goods[Math.round(0.5 +(3.99999 * Math.random()))-1]); –> </script>

The first example is what visitors see, the second is the source code script that produces the output. Assume the search engine spider is intelligent enough to read the script (however, actually not all the spiders do); is there anything in the code that can tell it about the Samsung Monitor? Hardly.

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This brief lesson is intended to provide some insight into who owns who in the contemporary search world and which search engines provide results for which. By knowing this, you will better understand which of them are the best to target when optimizing your pages.

A while ago, there were many different engines, almost equally popular among visitors that were constantly competing in popularity, number of searches, efficiency of search technology, number of indexed pages, etc. Nowadays, after a period of incorporation, all the minor companies are owned by the larger entities.

Who Owns Who

·    Yahoo! owns AllTheWeb, Lycos and AltaVista. Yahoo! also owns and uses Inktomi‘s technology and database for all the partnering engines under its wing.
·    Google partners with AOL, it is also a major result provider for many large engines because of its own cutting-edge technology (Netscape, Ask.com, Iwon).
·    Live Search does not own anybody and uses its own database (since February, 2005).

Who Feeds Who

The most outstanding work in the field of relationships between search result providers and consumers, and known to all SEO experts, is Bruce Clay’s SE relationship chart. Here we provide a static representation. The dynamic (and much more convenient) version is available at http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm

Here’s the search engine relationship chart:

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What is a Meta search engine?

It is a search tool that doesn’t create its own database of information. Instead, Meta search engines utilize multi-engine search, or a meta-search engine that combines results from a number of search engines at the same time and lays them out in a formatted result page. Metacrowler is a system that crawls the Web by follow links. This method of using multiple databases makes search results more comprehensive, but slows results.

A common or natural language request is translated to multiple search engines, each directed to find information the searcher requested. The search engine’s responses thus obtained are gathered into a single result list. This search type allows the user to cover a great deal of material in a very efficient way, retaining tolerance for imprecise search questions or keywords.

1 . How Meta search engines work

Some may believe that Google or Yahoo! index every Web page, that’s not the case. Actually, there are many reasons, on-page and off-page factors, why one search engine may index one page and not another. That’s where Meta search engines become interesting as they can address index data centers of multiple engines.

In short, a Meta search engine is an engine that gets listings from two or more other search engines, rather than using its own resources and tools.

Examples of multi-engines are MetaCrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com) &The Mother of all Search Engines (http://www.mamma.com/). MetaCrawler refers your search to seven of the most popular search engines (including AltaVista and Lycos), then compiles and ranks the results for you. Of course there are more Meta search engines. Like most tools, they don’t work in all situations. But it’s a good idea to experiment with these services the next time you search.

Clusty (http://www.clusty.com/) – Sources: Ask, GigaBlast, LookSmart, Lycos, Live Search, MSN, DMOZ, Special databases (New York Times, AP, Wikipedia) , WiseNut

Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com/) – Sources: Google, Yahoo!, Ask and About

ez2Find (http://www.ez2find.com/) – Sources: Google, AlltheWeb, Altavista, Live Search, Yahoo! and Ask.

Killer Info (http://www.killerinfo.com/) – Sources: AOL, Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, FAST, Lycos, AltaVista, Wisenut, LookSmart and DMOZ.

What you should remember from this lesson:

A Meta search engine is an engine that gathers listings from two or more other search engines, rather than using its own resources and tools.

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Yahoo Search Marketing offers Sponsored Search and Content Match. Sponsored search ads show up among search results in Yahoo and its partners; Content Match ads appear on the content partners of Yahoo (this is not search, but conventional websites that are capitalizing on their content by showing third-party ads from Yahoo or Google)

Other PPC Engines

A PPC model is an excellent source of income for any search engine. Therefore, almost every search engine offers PPC advertising opportunities. Among the more prominent PPC Engines are:

• LookSmart
• MIVA
• ePilot
• Mamma, etc.

Paid inclusion

With paid inclusion and submission, site owners pay search engines to get their sites reviewed and included either into the general search index, or into a directory. Yahoo! is the main player in the market of paid inclusion. It’s paid for inclusion programs are Search Submit, and Directory Submit.

Yahoo! Search Submit

Search Submit adds your site into Yahoo’s index and ensures that it will be re-crawled every 48 hours (as opposed to around two weeks for sites that were automatically added by crawler to the index). Search Submit costs include a $49 initial fee and cost-per-click fees (starting from $0.15) for each click you receive.

Yahoo! Directory Submit

With Directory Submit, there is a $299 fee for your site to be reviewed and (if accepted) added to Yahoo! Directory. After this, you will be subject to an annual recurring fee of $299. For more information about Yahoo! Pay for Performance products, please visit http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com

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AdWords ads can only contain 95 characters: 25 for the headline, then two 35-character-long description lines, and a visible URL field.

AdWords gives advertisers several options to target keywords: broad matching, exact matching, phrase matching, and negative keywords. The matching options define how close the search string entered by a user should be to a keyword selected by an advertiser. If the advertiser has chosen [tennis ball] as their keyword (square brackets mean exact match), their ad will be shown only if a user enters tennis ball into the search box. If the advertiser has chosen “tennis ball” (quotes mean phrase match), the ad show up if a user searches for red tennis ball or yellow tennis ball or simply tennis ball. Finally, if the advertiser has chosen tennis ball with no brackets or quotes around it (for a broad match), the ad will show up even if a user enters wilson rackets. With negative keywords, advertisers can prevent their ad from showing up if a user enters this keyword. For example, a retailer would usually add -free, -replica to the keywords list to avoid targeting “free stuff” hunters.

One recent development with AdWords was the release of AdWords API (application program interface) that will allow third-party developers to create applications that will work directly with AdWords accounts facilitating and automating many bid and ad management tasks.

You can learn more and sign up for Google AdWords at http://adwords.google.com

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The picture below demonstrates the difference between organic and paid search results in Google.

There are three main types of Pay for Performance options:

·    Pay-per-click – the best examples are Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions (formerly Overture). With pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, advertisers place bids for different search keywords. When users perform searches for these keywords, advertiser short, textual ads are shown together with organic results. If a user clicks on one of these ads, the advertiser is charged the per-click sum agreed to earlier.

·    Paid inclusion (or paid submission) is a fee-based inclusion into the database or directory of a search engine. The more prominent paid inclusion programs are Yahoo! Search Submit and Yahoo! Directory Submit.

·    Paid sponsorship – with this model, an advertiser pays a flat fee to a search engine. In return, the search engine shows the advertiser’s ads together with search results for pre-selected keywords. ExactSeek, for example, features this pay-for-performance model.

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DMOZ stands for “Directory.MOZilla” and is also known ODP which stands for Open Directory Project. It is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Time Warner that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.

After Google made the decision to remove links to DMOZ results from its result pages, DMOZ lost some of its importance. Listing there, however, can still be extremely profitable for your rankings and general Web visibility.

To submit, go to their main page, then find the most appropriate category for your site and click the “Suggest URL”. Unlike Yahoo! Directory, here you shouldn’t submit to a top-level category. Instead, drill down until you find the best subcategory for your site.

If you submit to an inappropriate category, the editor of that category has to transfer your submission to another category. In order to do that, he/she has to visit the main page and click through to find the “perfect” category. This is time consuming, and a lot of editors won’t do it. They’ll simply reject your submission. So, you should be very careful about choosing the best category for your site. When searching for an appropriate subcategory visit the different engines that utilize ODP results (Google and Google family: AOL Search and Netscape Search; then, AltaVista and finally Lycos). Search for your keyword phrase, and see which categories come up. Give your preference to results from the engine you’d most like to target.

Create a captivating title and description which contain your keywords. Make sure it is professional and sincere. Then complete the submission form.

Submit your main URL in the best subcategory. If you have an interior page that stands on its own and has a lot of relevant information, you can try submitting it into a second subcategory.

A “last updated on” note on your site can be informative to the editors, especially if it’s been updated very recently. Like the Yahoo! Directory, ensure that your site is error-free and there are no missing images or broken links. For instance, you may use the Web CEO Site-Quality Auditor for this purpose. Don’t submit directly to the ODP if you’ve submitted your site to the ODP links on any of the other engines.

A smart technique would be to attempt submitting to the regional categories at the ODP as well as career categories. You may be able to get listed in several categories in this manner.

The directory is compiled by volunteers and this may be one of the reasons why sometimes it’s quite difficult to get listed. So, once you have submitted your site, wait at least a month. Then, if you aren’t listed, go to http://www.resource-zone.com and post a question about your listing in the Site Submission Status Forum. If you want to detect whether you’ve been listed, don’t do it through the search as the index isn’t synchronized with the database very frequently. Instead, go to the correct category and look for your listing.

Another way to find out the results of your submission is to contact the category editor personally. When doing this be as polite as possible – these editors are volunteers and they do not like being told what they should and shouldn’t do. They will help as long as you show that you appreciate the job that they do.

Unlike Yahoo!, you shouldn’t re-submit to DMOZ because it pushes your site to the bottom of the queue and would just extend the waiting period.

As with Yahoo!, good content matters a great deal. Generally DMOZ won’t list sites that are only set up to earn affiliate income or sell something. Try to make your pages as informative about your subject as possible.

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To submit pages to the Yahoo! Directory, it will cost $299 for an annual review (for adult-related sites – $600). If you pay, it’s possibly to be listed within a few days. If you go the non-commercial route, it can take months and quite often they won’t list you at all. Registration at the Yahoo! portal is required for both cases.

Yahoo is now making use of clickthrough measurements as part of its relevancy ranking system. Searches performed at Yahoo!, instead of leading directly to websites, point to yahoo’s internal redirecting script so that Yahoo can measure what people are searching for. Yahoo also tracks and measures pages that are not directly listed in Yahoo but are linked from pages that are listed.

There are some tips that can help you get indexed in the directory faster if you are submitting as a standard (non-commercial) site. First, put a copyright notice and date on your page. Avoid using “trademarks” for your company or product name until after you’ve submitted and gotten indexed by Yahoo!. It appears that Yahoo! is concerned about posting anything that is trademarked as a company name in the listings. Yahoo! Directory will list additional pages of a site (beyond the one submitted) and/or subdomains if the editor finds the content unique and if there aren’t many listings for the same topic in the category.

It appears that Yahoo will reject your domain if it has more than 54 characters. Keeping Yahoo! compliance in mind, stay under 55 characters (not including the .com or other suffix) when choosing your domain name.

Yahoo! regularly performs checks for dead links. If your site is down during one of these checks, you may find it deleted from the Yahoo! Directory.

To sum up all of the above, the following is recommended for the Yahoo! Directory. First, try to get listed in their directory for free (register at the Yahoo! Portal, go to http://dir.yahoo.com and submit your URL under the related category).

When submitting for free, there is no guarantee your site will be reviewed and listed anytime soon. However there are some guidelines that might help. Try to purchase a domain name with your most important keywords in it, preferably separated by hyphens. If these keywords are your company name, it’s the best variant as you can submit the same words you use in the domain name as the name of your company. Create unique and original content for your website. Ensure it has no broken links or “Under construction” pages. If possible, make your design look as professional as possible because – remember – the site will be reviewed by a human editor. Generally, focus on proving to the directory that your site is all about your keyword phrase.

It will help if your site is more than just one page. It should have at least 6 to 7 pages. Put contact information at the bottom of the main page. When submitting a description, make sure it uses your key phrase. When choosing a subcategory, provide a second subcategory as well. Try to choose a subcategory that is close to the upper-level categories. If your keyword phrase is in the name of a subcategory, that’s an added bonus too.

Once you have submitted, wait for a couple of weeks. If your site still isn’t in the index, you may resubmit (there’s no penalty for resubmission and sometimes it helps), submit to another category or choose paid submission if you don’t have much time.

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When you submit a site to a directory, it is queued for editorial review. Usually, when you submit, you are allowed to choose the category your site will be placed under, and the desired description and title for your site, which will show up in a related category. However, the actual presence of your site is subject to the editor’s decision when he or she browses your site.

Directories DO NOT accept automated submissions and have special methods to protect themselves from auto-submission software. You should always submit manually to a directory.

What the directories are useless for?

With the directories, there’s no concept of “ranking”, because once you’ve been included into the index, your site is ranked within the appropriate category by an independent factor, for instance, alphabetically or according to the Google PageRank.

Thus, the concept of “optimization” has no bearing when applied to directories like DMOZ or Yahoo.

In terms of traffic, these directories are also of little value. The percentage of Web surfers that would prefer browsing categories in a directory over a regular search is quite small; few people tend to dive into the depth of the branchy vertical hierarchy of categories. Thus, on its own your category listing won’t bring much traffic.

What the directories are useful for?

Since the directories are compiled by humans and are for humans (unlike  search engine listings which are compiled by robots for humans), the relevancy of directory results is very high. Search engines know that – almost all search engine spiders start their regular crawl at a directory like DMOZ or Yahoo. If you are listed there, the search engines will find you during their next crawl, even without your submission.

Additionally, directories themselves have high PageRank values (as a rule). When you are listed in a directory, the directory is linking to your site. This link is considered high-quality and is very good for your overall link popularity, which is an influential factor when it comes to ranking. For  search engines that are able to analyze the context of your link (such as Google), your directory listing will be important because your link is supplemented by a relevant description.

This course describes two major search services that mainly function as directories and which are extremely valuable for ranking improvement: Yahoo! and DMOZ.

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