Category: Media

Selecting the best methods – such as graphics, pictures and video – to enhance a given campaign.

Search Engines, Spiders and Web Crawlers


How traffic results from search engine bots

Unless you published a direct link to your website which is clicked by a Web user, it is the search engines that ultimately bring your website to the attention of visitors who might eventually become the prospective customers that every Internet business craves. Hence it helps to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to customers initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search systems. The first is search engines that utilize robots or bots which are commonly referred to as crawlers or spiders. The second is Web directories which do not utilize crawlers or spiders, but categorize whole web sites rather than one page or a set of keywords, and human editors review site submissions for fitness. For the purpose of this post we’ll discuss search engines.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission form, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A spider€™ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site’s Meta tags and also follow the links that connects the site to other sites.

Search engines and traffic results vary

The spider then returns all that information to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine. A spider is almost like a book in the sense that it contains a table of contents, the actual content, as well as links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Some examples of popular search engines are, Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google, each one employing a different methodology or search structure known as an algorithm. When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

Search engine bots know your site well

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing which is often referred to as spamdexing. Then each algorithm analyzes the way in which pages link to, and are linked from, other pages in the Web.

By checking how pages link to each other, a search engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page and a number of other features and performance activity of that particular website.

Submitting Your Website To The Search Engines


Invite search engines to your site

Proper website promotion is becoming increasingly important. There are literally billions of web pages on the Internet, and this makes getting noticed online a very difficult task. The first step to getting your web page visited by your target audience is to submit the page to search engines and directories.

You may think the search engines, like Yahoo, Google, Altavista, or Excite, somehow search every document on every server to find a match, but that is not the case. In order for a website to be included in search results, the web crawler – or search engine bot or spider – has to know that the site exists.

This is where submitting your website to search engines and directories becomes important. This is your way of telling the search engines that you exist, so they can point potential viewers to your site. There are several ways to go about submitting your site to the various search engines.

Search engine submission is a process

You can submit your site directly to each individual search engine, you can use an agent to submit your website for you, or you can use automated website submission forms.

The first option is certainly the cheapest option, and you will know that the job is done because you will have done it yourself; but there are several important drawbacks to consider if you are thinking about submitting your website to search engines directly. While it is true that it only costs you some time and there will be no doubt in your mind that it has been done, there are some difficulties.

 

First, it can be a very time-consuming and tedious process. Secondly, submitting these forms is an art; you’ll need to get it right so that you get the best page-ranking possible. If you have little or no experience in this area, you may want to think twice before submitting your site to the search engines on your own.

Explore alternative submission methods

That being said, if you know what to do and how to do it, submitting on your own can save you money and maybe even a headache or two.

Another option is to use an agent. This is a real live person who will submit your website to all the search engines manually. This person will ensure that it is done properly, in a timely manner, and in such a way that will maximize your page views. Again, there are some things to consider when you are looking at this option.

For starters, you need to make sure you are getting someone reputable who will actually do the job his or herself, and not delegate it to an online submission service, or else you could just be throwing your money away. Also, an agent can be very pricey, so you need to make sure that your website is sufficiently unique to call for such a specialized service.

The submission process can be automated

Lastly, there are automated website submitters all over the Web. Finding one should not be difficult. Finding a reputable one that is worth the money is a different story. Most of these services come pretty cheap, but you don’t get the high level of service you would get through an agent or by doing the job yourself.

However, depending on what your specific needs are, the speed make these submission services an attractive option for many website owners, bloggers, article marketers and webmasters.

It is wise to check out your favorite online trade association to make sure that the site you are dealing with is legitimate. Look for things like physical addresses and phone numbers to help verify the legitimacy of any given website submission service.