Major Search Engines and Directories

    In Chapter 5: Major Search Engines & Directories provides you with essential info on today’s most popular and most powerful search engines in the world. Get a little history on each company and learn some stats that determine the success of these search engines in the World Wide Web. Also, find out the significance of directories, and how they can also be used to make your site findable by the billions of internet users on the planet.

  • Major Search Engines and Directories
    • Search Engines and Directories
    • Search Engine Guidelines
    • Search Engines
      • Google
      • Yahoo
      • MSN
    • Directories

       

      Yahoo Directory, Open Directory (DMOZ), Google Directory, Lists of Other Directories

    • Forums

SEO for Google


    Based on search engine market shares, Google appears to be the search engine of choice by internet users around the world. Nearly half of the search engine queries made globally was done on Google.

    This company and the search engine began in 1998 in Menlo Park, California, as the brainchild of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who are now the current presidents of the search engine empire. As of 2007, the net income of this company amounted to more than $4.2 billion.

    According to Wikipedia, a considerable amount of the total revenue of Google is gathered from the online advertising opportunities it offers to web masters and companies. It was in 2006 when more than $10 billion was earned by Google from advertising revenues alone.

    For clients who wish to advertise using the world’s most popular search engine, the options provided by Google are: Google AdSense, Google AdWords, and the Google Content Network. You will learn more about these in succeeding chapters of this site.

    For SEO purposes, Google allows sites to be submitted, either to the search engine itself or to the directory. Google also supplies web masters with tools that allow them to update, monitor, and maintain their sites.

    Some of the current undertakings of Google outside that of the World Wide Web include the launching of a Google Phone, which is a smart touch screen unit that is intended to upstage the iPhone.    

    For webmasters who wish to get listed on the world’s most popular search engine, they should first check out the site submission guidelines on this link: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters

    To put it simply, Google states some of the do’s and don’ts that should be remembered when submitting a site for listing. There are quality guidelines that should be followed in order for a site to avoid becoming penalized or considered as spam. More on spam will be discussed in chapter 10.

    Google doesn’t like sites that attempt to stuff in tons of keywords at one page. Cloaking, unnecessary redirecting, and hidden content are big problems that Google has already developed ways of finding.

    Pages that are to be submitted to Google should have the visitors as the primary target and not simply for search engine spiders to crawl on. It is not recommended for a site to participate in unethical link building practices, such as in Free for All pages or link farms.

    You should not create duplicate content for your website, as well as avoid creating sites that will install viruses such as Trojans and also spy ware. Furthermore, if your site is to be laden with content, such content must be unique and original. Proper citation of references is needed if material is obtained from elsewhere.

    According to Google, there are additional designing and content guidelines that all web masters should check out. If any errors are found in the site design, it is advisable to have changes implemented immediately, and then submit the site again for Google to reconsider.