Are You Search Engine Savvy?

The last, and most important, factor to your website success is your own search engine savvy. 

Unless you have a lot of money and can afford to pay an expert to help you monitor and change your website to keep it current, you must understand the basic principles of search engines.

With this understanding you can capitalize on how these engines work, and the information they deliver to your prospective customer.

Before we touch on some of the search engine focus areas, you should understand the different types of search mechanisms offered on the web.

• Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site.  A 'spider' is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. 

Just like your customers, it searches websites.  The spider finds the content and words on each website, notes any links you may have to other sites and stores all the information in its index. 

It will visit each link you have on your website and index that site as well.  Some search engine spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don't create a site with 500 pages!

Think of the spider like the Library of Congress.  It contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Search engines include Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

• Directories do not use a spider, but rather they use index submissions from web users and website owners. 

While most of these directories include your website information in their index, you will probably only get index references that lead to your home page, rather than all the pages on your site. 

It certainly doesn't hurt to submit your website to a directory service, but you should understand that you are likely to get less traffic to the other important pages on your website. 

If your home page is the most important and crucial page to your business, you may not care about this omission.

Open Directory and Yahoo! are directory based search services

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