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Optimize your website for top position in search engines
SURE, anyone can build a website with a little or no practice but attracting visitors to your website is not as easy as one would like to think. It requires considerable amount of knowledge and skill to optimize your website for search engines and get listed in the top search results of major search engines. As almost all websites get the major share of their traffic from search engines so it is always increasingly difficult to build a website that meets the search engines’ ranking criteria and achieves top ranking in results.
Before you can actually begin to start optimizing a website for search engines, you must understand how search engines work. As a webmaster, you must be aware of many types of search engines. Also, knowing how search engines work will make sure that you get a good amount of visitors on your website. This will be helpful in finding general information on the internet.
All internet search engines are special sites that are designed to help people find information stored on other sites. There are differences in the ways various search engines work, but they all perform the basic task of accepting keywords or phrases and using those keywords to search a huge database of links to Web pages. The search engine will then rank the results it finds and sorts the links it considers to be more relevant, which are usually on top of the list.
Earliest search engines were developed by university students in the beginning of the nineties with the very basic search abilities. Google, presently the most dominant search engine, is only five years old. Yahoo however, has been there since 1994.
Depending on the way they work, there are four main types of search engines: indexes, directories, metasearch and pay for placement.
Most of the popular and comprehensive search engines on the Web are indexing engines – also known as crawler or spider based search engines. The technology of indexing search engines is based on automating the indexing and collection of data through the use of search engine robots known as “spiders” or “crawlers”.
Spiders or crawlers are programmes that automatically fetch web pages. They visit web pages, either through user submission, or links from another page and keep on jumping from one link on to the other. This process continues until all linked pages are visited. Search engines like Google use a large number of spiders crawling different pages. It is a continuous process, as spiders of search engines are always crawling the web and updating their databases. They scan through millions of websites and gather specifically targeted information for queries by users.
When you submit a web page to a search engine, the new URL is added to the robot’s list of websites to visit. Even if you don’t directly submit a page, many robots will find your site because other websites are linked to yours. So the more links you have on the web more easily the spiders will find you.
Whenever a user enters a keyword(s) into the search box, the search engines search through the index to find the word(s) or phrase and returns the matching results.
The page information title and keyword list that the spider finds goes into the second part of a search engine, the index. The index is like a database that contains the information the spider found during its crawl. This index is then searched every time you enter a keyword query at the search site. When you perform a search at an indexing engine, then you are not actually querying the entire web, but only the portion which spiders have scanned and included in their databases. Examples of indexing search engines are: Google, AltaVista, and AlltheWeb
You can control the behavior of robots and crawlers on your website using a file called robots.txt .When a spider visits a website it looks for the robots.txt file in the root (home) directory of your website. Using simple arguments in a text file webmasters can allow or disallow a spider from indexing their website and can prevent certain files or folders from being indexed so, if you need to exclude something from search engine indexing, this is the most effective tool. However as the spiders look for the robots.txt file only in the root directory so it can only be used with top level domains. More information about the setting up of robots.txt file can be found at
A web directory consists of a listing of websites organized into categories and sub categories, usually arranged hierarchically. Unlike the search engines which are automated most of the directories are compiled and organized by human editors which is also the main advantage directories have over search engines, being managed by a human results in a more relevant and clean listing of the sites. As each site is reviewed by a human editor before it is included so it ensures the quality of sites included in the directory. Although the quantity of results is usually much fewer than those returned by an indexing engine, their relevancy and qualities are usually much higher. Along with the link directories a small description of your website which has been approved by the owner of the directory or the information that you gave while submitting the website to the directory is displayed, directories don’t display information found dynamically on your web pages, so even if the a website updates and adds new pages it will have no effect on its position and description in the directory.
Some of the larger directories allow you to search for topics, but it’s a very limited kind of search as these search functions only search through the directory’s categories and listings (i.e. titles, descriptions and URLs as they appear in their database) and not the sites.
Directories come in handy when you want to see a list of websites relating to a particular subject or topic. Most directories are browsable i.e. you can click on a subject of interest to see links and subcategories on your topic.
Some of the popular web directories include The Open Directory Project ,Yahoo directory and Looksmart .With the Open Directory Project
Metasearch engines are designed to query the databases of various search engines simultaneously and integrate the results at one place, so you don’t have to search each engine individually. They don’t have a database of their own and only outsource other search engines. The search results obtained from different engines are sorted either according to their sources or arranged in a continuous list.
The use of Metasearch engines has grown in recent years because of their ability to put together the most relevant results from several databases at once .However the only disadvantage of using the Metasearch engine is that users are not able to access advanced search features that many search engines offer. Some of the major Metasearch engines include WebCrawler, Mamma, Dogpile and Ixquick.com
Growing competition between websites for search rankings have also resulted in the emergence of ‘Pay for Placement ‘ Search engines. As the name suggests through these engines, website owners can pay for a website to be placed in a pre-defined position within some search engines. Search engines show these results as ‘sponsored results’ along with normal listings. Sponsored results in Yahoo, MSN and AltaVista are provided by Overture whereas Google has its own service known as Google Adwords .
As the sponsored sites are paying for their placement in search engines so almost all of them require some renumeration for their services. They are usually helpful when you’re searching for something to purchase.
The most crucial question related to search engine optimization is that how are websites ranked in search results. Every search engine has its own criteria on which it compiles the results .These results are ranked on a particular query by analysing the page title, its description , the number of sites that are linked to the page, frequency of occurrences of the search term, location of the search term in the page etc. .No search engine gives its users the exact algorithm on which the search results are prepared so we only have a rough idea of the factors that affect a site’s ranking in a search engine. Search engines weigh different parameters of a web site according to their own algorithms e.g. some pay importance to the titles and descriptions while others rank their results on the basis of the sites that link to a webpage.
Google’s famous Page Rank Technology on which it orders its results is also based on the sites that link to a webpage. PageRank is the Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance to the web so a website having more links is considered more important keeping the fact in mind that only a website with good content will have links from other sites. Every page in the Google’s index is allotted a page rank on a scale of zero to ten.
The more the pages linking to your site the better will be its rank so high-quality sites that have more sites linking to them receive a higher page rank as compared to small sites
Not only the number of links but also the quality of sites that link to a page is also important.
The web pages listed in the Google directory are also arranged according to their page rank in descending order. The small green bars alongside of each listing is an indication of the page rank. If you have the Google toolbar installed in your browser, it can also be used to see each page’s page rank as you browse the Web. Although page rank isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is certainly the most important one.
Other search engines like Teoma and Ask use subject specific popularity, they consider the web to be organized in communities of sites that relate to each other and rank websites based on the number of pages that link to a page within that same community.
The title and description that will be displayed when your site appears in a search engine are controlled by META Tags. Meta tags are parts of the HTML document that are used to describe the page content for the search engines they are placed within the head area of an HTML file .Although many META Tags each having different features are available but mostly the Title ,Description and Keywords META Tags are used
The title of websites that appear in search engines and in the title of Internet explorer (or any other web browser) window is controlled by the title Meta Tag. The description tag provides an explanation of the page in place of the summary the search engine will display. The keywords tag provides keywords with which the search engine will associate your page.
The trend of website owners to insert every related and unrelated information in the description and keywords has become quite common.
So now most of the search engines don’t give them much importance. Google automatically creates its own description and ignores the Meta description tag completely. However many search engines support it partially.
There is no single hard and fast rule that will enable you to get the desired number of visitors on your website. The most important thing for a website is its content, so if it is interesting or informative people will provide links for it and visitors will come your way. So make sure that your webpage is for the people and not for search engines.
Percentage of searches done through major search engines (May 2004)
Search Engine Share
Google 36.8%
Yahoo 26.6%
MSN 14.5%
AOL 12.8%
Ask Jeeves 1.8%
Source: com Score Media Metrix
Size of search engines (in billions of documents). The number of documents indexed by major search engines apart from HTML files include PDF files, Microsoft Office documents and other similar files
Google 3.3
AllheWeb 3.2
InkTomi 3.0
Teoma 1.5
Altavista 1.0
Source: searchenginewatch.com
The writer
