SEARCH ENGINES

Search engines are automated tools that send out 'crawlers' or 'spiders' to scan the web and index every website that they find.

The submission process for a website is simply to provide the URL for a page and the search engine will visit the site and index the text and HTML tags.

Submit your site to the main search engines and resubmit your site any time you make significant changes.

Search engines should revisit on a regular schedule. However, some search engines have grown smart enough to realize some sites only change content once or twice a year, so they may visit less often.

Resubmitting after major changes will help ensure that your site's content is kept current. However submitting your site too often is not a good idea, especially if no significant changes have been made, as search engines do not look favourably on this.

Verify and maintain your listing - check on your pages and ensure they get listed.

Once your pages are listed in a search engine, monitor your listing every week or two.

Strange things happen.

Pages disappear from catalogs.

Links go screwy.

Watch for trouble, and resubmit if you spot it.

The following is a summary of the most important search engines on the web.

They all operate differently and will use a variety of 'algorithms' to retrieve websites once a search has been made on them.

However, please remember that these algorithms change regularly and therefore optimizing your site should be an ongoing process. 

Google

Factors to consider for a high search engine ranking on Google.

• Keywords used within the Title tag
• Page content, position and emphasis of keywords
• The 'theme' of the site, including the number of pages indexed and the use of keywords throughout
• Having a site listed on the Open Directory with a keyword relevant description
• The number of inbound hyperlinks from other relevant and quality websites.

As Google often change their requirements about what factors help with a good ranking, please check Google’s latest news.  

Submitting a site to Google.

It is free to get your site listed on Google and, as it conducts regular updates, it may take anything from several weeks to several months for a new site to appear.

Google provides an online submission form where the URL of a site can be submitted, but it can often be better to get a site linked from an existing domain on Google, so that the Googlebot spider will find the site through its travels around the web.

submit your site

Google will deep index a website, either on the first visit or after several updates, including pages within a frame. It will also index PDF documents hosted on a site.  

Alltheweb

Factors to consider for a high search engine ranking on FAST / Alltheweb.

FAST has been known to frequently change the importance of different ranking factors, but the key elements that can determine a site's listing are very similar to the other main search engines.

Factors to consider to achieve a high ranking include:

• Search terms used within the Title tag and the Description metatag
• Page content, position and emphasis of keywords
• Pages submitted through the paid inclusion programme receive a ranking benefit
• The number of inbound hyperlinks from other relevant and quality websites.  

Site submission

Search results on AlltheWeb are provided by Yahoo!. For fast submission to the Yahoo! Search index via the Overture Site Matchtm program, Click Here. 

Overture® Pay-For-PerformanceTM

Bid on keywords and your business appears in search results on the Web's premier sites, attracting buying customers looking for precisely what you sell.

• With one buy, reach over 80% of Internet users worldwide
• Put your business in search results on the Web's leading search sites, including Yahoo!, AltaVista, AlltheWeb, and others
• Pay for each sales lead, not each impression, leading to a high return on investment. 

Free Submission Service

Search results on AlltheWeb are provided by Yahoo!.

Submit a Site

Overture Site Match(tm)

Search results on AltaVista are powered by Yahoo! Search Technology. For fast submission to the Yahoo! Search index via the Overture Site Match(tm) program.

Express Inclusion

The AltaVista Express Inclusion program has been discontinued. Legacy Express Inclusion customers will continue to receive distribution on the historical AltaVista network until their subscriptions expire.

Basic Submit

Search results on AltaVista are powered by Yahoo! Search Technology. If you are interested in submitting your site to be considered for inclusion in the Yahoo! Search index. (Yahoo! registration required).  

Lycos

Factors to consider for a high search engine ranking on Lycos.

These are the same as for FAST.

Factors to consider to achieve a high ranking include:

• Search terms used within the Title tag and the Description metatag
• Page content, position and emphasis of keywords
• Pages submitted through the paid inclusion programme receive a ranking benefit
• The number of inbound hyperlinks from other relevant and quality websites.  
•  

Submitting a site to Lycos

Reach the consumers you want with Lycos InSite AdBuyer™—an auction based pay per click product. Create and manage keyword-targeted ads to promote your web site 

Hotbot

Factors to consider for a high search engine ranking on HotBot.

These factors will be dependent on the source search indexes that HotBot uses, so please refer to each individual page provided for these.

The main factors consistent on all tools to achieve a high ranking, however, will be the common optimization criteria, such as:

• Search terms used within the Title tag and the Description metatag
• Page content, position and emphasis of keywords
• The number of inbound hyperlinks from other relevant and quality websites  
   

Submitting your site to Hotbot

Hotbot web search is powered by Inktomi, one of the world’s leading providers of web search services. A free website submission service is currently not offered by Inktomi. 

Yahoo

The goal of Yahoo! Search is to discover and index all of the content available on the web to provide the best possible search experience to users. The Yahoo! Search index, which contains several billion web pages, is more than 99% populated through the free crawl process.

Submitting a site to Yahoo

Yahoo! also offers several ways for content providers to submit web pages and content directly to the Yahoo! Search index and the Yahoo! Directory. 

The Open Directory

The Open Directory Project is a web directory of Internet resources. A web directory is something akin to a huge reference library. The directory is hierarchically arranged by subject - from broad to specific. The ODP is maintained by community editors who evaluate sites for inclusion in the directory. They are our experts, and all submissions are subject to editor evaluation. 

Submitting a site to the open Directory

Adding a site is easy! Simply follow these instructions.  

LookSmart

LookSmart's PPC product, LookListings delivers qualified leads to advertisers from LookSmart's top-tier syndication partners, including Lycos, InfoSpace, CNET's Search.com, Apple Sherlock, Snap.com and more. 

Submitting a site to LookSmart

180+ demographically targeted search sites plus a distribution network of qualified partners

Monitored traffic via LookSmart TrueLead

Various ways to extend your reach to consumers, including Smart (keyword targeting including slight variations) and Broad matching (targets all queries containing keywords)

Proactive customer service, including campaign optimization, educational webinars and informative newsletters 

UNDERSTANDING MSN

Like all of the major search engines, MSN builds their index of sites using spiders to crawl the web, finding new and changed information.

This information is then processed by the MSN servers using complex algorithms to determine which sites are most relevant to the search query entered.

This may seem like an extraordinarily complex process and it is, however the resulting environment is simple: all search engine algorithms are mathematical and thus, there is a fixed set of rules and factors which, if addressed correctly, will result in a high ranking.

In short, because it's math we have the benefit of knowing that if we take action x and action y we will get result z.

The Rules For MSN Assuming that you are following the right rules, the results you can achieve on MSN can be fast and solid.

MSN does not apply the same types of aging delays that the other two engines do and thus, when you change your content, the change in results can be realized as quickly as they reindex your site and as quickly as your incoming links get picked.

This differs greatly from Google and Yahoo! in that those two engines age both domains and links, requiring a longer period of time before the full effects of your efforts are realized.

As an additional note on MSN, users of MSN are 48% more likely to purchase a product or service online than the average Internet user according to a comScore Media report.

So what are the rules for MSN that can help us get top rankings?

As with all the major engines, there are two fundamental areas that need to be addressed to attain top rankings.

The first is the onsite factors, the second is the offsite. Because they are fundamentally different we will address them separately.

Onsite SEO Factors The problem with writing an article about the onsite factors is that by the time many of you read this some of the weïght these factors hold and the optimal levels noted may well be out-of-date.

Thus, rather than listing overly-specific-and-sure-to-change factors we will focus on how to know what the factors are, how to get a handle on what you need to adjust and by how much, and how to predict what will be coming down the ro

How To Know What The Factors Are: Unfortunately there's no one over at MSN Search calling us up weekly to let us know what the specifics of their algorithm are; we have to figure it out for ourselves with research, reading and playing with test sites.

From all of this, there is only one conclusion that an SEO can make: the details matter. When we're discussing onsite factors this includes: the content of the page including keyword density the internal linking structure of the site (how the pages of your site are linked together) the number of pages in your site and the relevancy of those pages to your main topic and phrases the use of titles, heading tags and special formats

There are also a number of lower-weight factors, but the ones noted above, if addressed correctly, will have a significant effect on your rankings, especially if the offsite factors noted below are also addressed.

Page Content: The content of your page must be perfect. What I mean by this is that the content must appeal to both the search engines and the algorithms. In order to write properly for the visitors you must be able to write clearly and in language that is both appealing and understandable to your target market.

While there is much debate about whether the keyword density of your page is important, I am certainly one who believes that it is. It only makes sense that a part of the algorithm takes into account the use of the keywords on your page.

Unfortunately, the optimal keyword density changes slightly with each algorithm update and also by site type and field.

For this reason, it would be virtually impossible for me to give you a density that will work today and forevermore.

You will need a keyword density analysis tool which you will want to run on your own site as well as the sites in the top 10 to assess what the optimal density is at this time.

You may notice a variation in the densities of the top 10.

This is due to other factors, including offsite which can give extra weïght to even a poorly optimized site.

I recommend getting your site to a keyword density close to the higher-end of the top 10.

Traditionally this percentage will fall somewhere near 3.5 to 4% for MSN.ad.

And so we'll begin: Internal Linking Structure: The way your pages link together tells the search engines what the page is about and also allows them to easily (or not-so-easily) work their way to your internal pages. 

If your site has an image or script-based navigation, it is important to also use text links either in your content, in a footer, or both.

Text links are easy to follow for a spider and, perhaps more importantly, text links allow you the opportunïty to tell the spiders what a specific page is about through the anchor text and, in the case of footers, allows you to add in more instances of the targeted phrases outside of your general content area.

The Number Of Pages & Their Relevancy: MSN wants to please their visitors. They want to ensure that a searcher will find what they need once they get to your site. For this reason, a largër site with unified content will rank higher than a smaller site or a site with varying content topics. (note: this assumes that all else is equal in regards to other ranking factors)

When you are optimizing your site for MSN be sure to take some time to build quality content.

Do a search on your major competitors to see how large their sites are. Over time you will want to build yours to the same size through general content creation or the addition of a blog or forum to your site. Titles, Heading Tags & Special Formats: Titles are the single most important piece of code on your entire web page for two reasons.

The first is that it holds a very high level of weïght in the algorithm. The second reason is that it is your window to the world.

When someone runs a search, the results will generally show your page title in the search results. This means that a human visitor has to be drawn to click on your title, or ranking your site is a futile effort (this isn't about bragging rights, it's about return on investment).

Heading tags are used to specify significant portions of content.

The most commonly used is the H1 tag though there are obviously others (or they wouldn't bother numbering them would they).

The H1 tag is given a significant amount of weïght in the algorithm provided that it is not abused through overuse (it should only be used once per page). Try to keep your headings short-and-sweet. They are there to tell your visitor what the page is about, not your whole site.

Special formats are, for the purpose of this article, text formatting that distinguishes a set of characters or words apart from other text.

This includes such things as anchor text, bold, italic, different font colors, etc. When you set content apart using special formats, MSN will read this as a part of your content that you want to draw attention to and which you obviously want your visitors to see. This will increase the weïght of that content. Now, don't go making all your keyword bold or some such - simply make sure to use special formats properly. Inline text links (links in the body content of your page) are a great way to increase the weïght of specific text while actually helping your visitor by providing easy paths to pages they may be interested in.

Offsite SEO Factors With MSN, the offsite factors are much simpler to deal with than either Google or Yahoo! MSN will give you full credït for a link the day they pick it up, so link building while time consuming, is rewarded much quicker on MSN.

When dealing with MSN and offsite SEO, there are two main factors to consider when acquiring links: Relevancy. The site must be relevant to your site to hold any real weïght. Quality is better than quantity.

Because PageRank is Google-specific we can't use it as the grading tool for MSN. Spending extra time to find quality sites, however, is well rewarded.

Also, obtaining one-way links as opposed to reciprocal links is becoming increasingly important, and I'd recommend utilizing both in your link building strategies.

You should begin your offsite optimization by running link checks on your competitors to see what you're up against.

This is also a good place to look for potential link partners though those of you using a tool such as Total Optimizer Pro or PR Prowler will find it far faster and more effective to use these tools.

Conclusion This entire article may seem fairly simplistic and there's a reason for that.

What we've noted above is a list of the more important areas.

About The Author
Dave Davies is the CEO of the SEO firm Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning