Pre­vi­ous posts on this Blog have intro­duced the con­cepts of ‘Search Engine Optim­isa­tion’ for your web­site and its value as a mar­ket­ing strategy.

To con­tinue with this theme, in this post I’m going to get under the bon­net to give you a basic under­tand­ing of the mech­an­ics of how the search engines work.

Under­stand­ing what a search engine is and how the major ones like Google work, is an import­ant aspect to grasp if you’re going to optim­ise your web­site. Once the basic con­cepts have been under­stood, then it’s easier to build a web­site that may be effect­ively pro­moted in Google.

Search Engines and Directories

What’s the dif­fer­ence between a search engine like Google and a web dir­ect­ory such as Yell.com?

Search engines are huge data­bases that reg­u­larly browse the web in order to cata­logue it. Once cata­logued or indexed as it is known, ref­er­ences to the web­sites they find are stored within their data­bases in read­i­ness for when people like you and I visit their search page in order to search for a par­tic­u­lar type of website.

The entire pro­cess is auto­mated without any human inter­ven­tion. This cata­loguing or index­ing of the web, is done using pieces of soft­ware called ‘Search Engine Spiders’ or ‘Search Engine Robots’. Spider soft­ware is con­trolled by com­plex math­em­at­ical pro­cesses called algorithms which are unique to each search engine.

Exactly how these algorithms work is a closely guarded secret, but through exper­i­ence and fol­low­ing pub­lished rules, a web­site that assists the spider­ing pro­cess and con­forms to the needs of an algorithm, has a greater chance of being lis­ted highly within a search engine’s results.

Take a look at www.google.co.uk/webmasters for Google’s pub­lished rules on optim­ising your website.

Dir­ect­or­ies, of which there are many examples on the web, Yell.com being a pop­u­lar one; are essen­tially online ver­sions of paper dir­ect­or­ies like the Yel­low Pages or the Thom­son Local. They do not index the web using Spider soft­ware like search engines in order to estab­lish their entries, but instead rely upon humans to manu­ally add entries to their databases.

Dir­ect­or­ies gen­er­ally group entries or web­sites that are sim­ilar to each other, together into sub­ject and regional cat­egor­ies e.g. “Account­ants in Leeds” or “Hotels in Wake­field”. Many online dir­ect­or­ies often con­tain a keyword search form on their home page that helps fil­ter the con­tents of their cat­egor­ies for the User of their site. Search engine optim­isa­tion has no impact upon the res­ults you may find in an online directory.

Get­ting Lis­ted in the Directories

Get­ting your site lis­ted in a par­tic­u­lar dir­ect­ory is usu­ally a mat­ter of sub­mit­ting your website’s link to it. Look for a “Sub­mit My Site”, “Add My Site” or a “Get Lis­ted” link some­where on the directory’s website.

Many dir­ect­or­ies charge an inclu­sion fee in order to list a web­site link; how­ever this can often be worth the cost if you feel a par­tic­u­lar dir­ect­ory is pop­u­lar amongst your tar­get cus­tom­ers. Some of the more pop­u­lar web dir­ect­or­ies such as Appleg­ate (www.applegate.co.uk) can make a pos­it­ive impact upon your website’s PageR­ank value, so it’s worth con­sid­er­ing get­ting your site lis­ted in the most pop­u­lar web dir­ect­or­ies where you can and if your budget can stretch to their inclu­sion fees.

Other Posts Sim­ilar To This One

• Search Engine Optim­ise Your Product Pages with the Product Name
• Web­site Mar­ket­ing and Man­age­ment Improves Your Bottom-Line
• Does Your Busi­ness Web­site Need Search Engine Marketing?