Search Engines are a vital tool on the Internet. They provide web surfers with a way to find what they are looking for. Some of the most popular Search Engines are Excite, GoTo, Lycos, and MSN. There are literally 1,000's more of them, but they all serve the same purpose for the most part.
In order to use a Search Engine, all you do is type in a single keyword or phrase, click search and voila, you have a list of related web sites. Depending on your keyword and which particular search engine you use, you could have anywhere from 10 to 10,000,000 web sites in your results. Ok, you probably already knew that much. The real question is how do I get my web site to show up in those results and show up within the top 10 results. Well, as in many things in life, it all depends.
The first thing you need is a good web site. The second thing you need is to have an effective set of keyword and description META tags in your home page. These META tags must appear in this format:
and they must be located within the tags of your home page. Your keywords can either be a single word or a phrase and must be separated with a comma like this "asp, active server pages". Your description is a brief and to the point description of your web site.
Many Search Engines have advanced tools that rank your web site according to keyword relevance. In order for your keywords to be considered relevant, they should be used in your description META tag and also within the text of your home page. As a general rule, your keywords should appear at least 3 times within the text of your home page in order for them to be considered relevant. Be careful, though. If your keywords appear more than 8 times on your page, it may be considered spam by search engines and be banned from their listing service all together.
Now, you have your web site and your META tags. What next? Well, now you need to submit your web site to the search engines. You can do this manually on your own each month, which could potentially take hours of your own time or you can use a low cost search engine submission service like our SubmitME! program.
When you submit your web site to the major search engines, you want to use keywords that are as specific as possible. The reason for this is that search engines are big business these days. They charge literally $1,000's of dollars per month to huge corporations that want their web sites listed at the top of a given category and if you have a small business or personal web site, you simply cannot compete with that. For example, let's say you have a car dealership web site and you use "cars, trucks, sports utility vehicle" as your keywords. When a web surfer searches for the term cars, they will get a long list of car manufacturers like Chrysler, Ford, and Toyota. They will also get a long list of car rental companies like Avis, Budget, and Hertz because those companies are paying the top dollar to be listed first. You probably would not find your listing until about 300 sites later if you are lucky. Once you get past the top paying companies, most search engines list smaller web sites in random order so there is really not much you can do about that. Sometimes you may be listed within the top 100 and sometimes it will be the top 100,000. Sure, there are a couple of tricks that you can try that may help a little bit, but unless you are ready and willing to pay for it, you are better off looking for other options.
So how do we solve this dilemma? Narrow down your keywords. Instead of just using keywords like these: "cars, trucks, sports utility vehicle" try using specific brands or names like these: "Ford Bronco, Toyota Corolla" or narrow it down geographically like this: "Charlotte NC car dealerships, NC Ford dealerships", etc.
What else can I do? Nowadays, there are lots of smaller industry specific directories and search engines you can use. For example, if you are a manufacturing company, you can list your web site with the Thomas Register Directory of Manufacturers. There are also lots of geographically oriented search engines like www.uk.goto.com for the United Kingdom.
Search engines are a necessity for the survival of the Internet and its web sites in general. If you do not list your web site with search engines, the only people can find your site is either by word of mouth or by accident. That's a tough way to grow your web site, so get your web site and META tags together and start submitting!
http://www.aspwebpro.com/tutorials/internet/searchengines.asp
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