In part 1 of this article we looked at the various methods of driving internet traffic to your website. Statistics on search engines are staggering – with 85% of all visitors to a website coming from an initial search on one of the major engines. Part 2 of this series will concentrate solely on the search engines and a number of common questions raised on the subject.

How Many Search Engines are there?

Not that many! Despite the abundance of adverts and spam promising to submit your site to 200, 2,000 or 200,000 search engines and directories there really are only a small number of useful, worthwhile search engines. Some well known engines also use results from other engines and for the most part the smaller engines are either using another engine's results, are too small to really consider or are just a collection of links.

The high figures promised by the "2,000 search engine spam" is usually made up of around 20 or so worthwhile and useful search engines/directories with the rest being smaller engines, unkown directories or just FFA sites where you can submit a listing.

Whats a FFA Site?

FFA stands for free-for-all. Generally they will allow anyone to submit a site to them and that site will stay top of the list until someone else submits a site (usually within 10 – 30 seconds!) and then they will become number 2, and so on. Generally FFA's are a complete and utter waste of time. 85% of surfers use Google at the moment to start their browsing experience, the remaining 15% (not surprisingly) are looking for quality search links and are normally found using the search engine of their ISP (MSN for example) or Yahoo, Lycos, Altavista, Ask Jeeves – NOT an unkown FFA or equivelant.

What about the directories?

Good point. Some of the search engines either rely on the larger directories for their content OR the mere fact they also appear in a directory used by the search engine can increase their rankings. Typical of this kind of relationship is DMOZ and Google. DMOZ is an independent, open source project and Google purchases it's directory and uses the content as the Google Directory. Having a listing with DMOZ is also widely reported to help your rank on Google.

The best known directory, Yahoo, charges $299 for a listing which is widely reported as being excellent value for money.

OK, so what is rank? And what about PR/Pagerank?

Rank is where you appear in a search engine when searching for your chosen keywords. Unsing amazon.com as an example, if you were to type in “online book store” in a search engine and amazon.com popped out first in the list, it's rank would be 1 in that particular search engine. If it came out third in the list then it's rank would be 3 and so on.

PageRank is a term used by Google, which roughly translates to the actual importance of a page. This importance is measured by Google on the basis of how many other sites are linking to that page, and how important those pages are deemed to be by Google. The rank ranges from 1 – 10, and you can view the pagerank of any site if you have the Google toolbar installed. It is widely reported that high PR equals high ranking in Google searches.

What's so important about being on the first page?

Everything! If you think of the number of times you use a search engine, type in the relevant keywords and view the results – how many times do YOU go beyond the first page? If the site ranked number 1 fulfills your search it is unlikely you will go beyond that. If you are searching for a product or service you might visit four or five sites, but if the search engine has done its job then those 4 or 5 will also be on the front page.

In real life of course only 10 listings can be on the front page, and of course many, many people do look past the first page (and the second, and the third). In addition, many people also search for things in different ways. To take x2cms as an example, you could find it by searching for “website builder” or you could also find it by searching for “build a website fast”. This is where SEO's come in.

OK, what's an SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimiser. SEO's charge a fee for carrying out a number of services (some deemed ethical, others not quite so ethical) to try and ensure a site has a good ranking on a search engine. SEO's are probably a whole article in themselves and just like any large group of consultants they frequently disagree with each other on what works, what doesn't, what is ethical and what shouldn't ever be done to get a good rank in an engine.

How come you keep going on about something being “widely reported”?

The problem with search engines is that no-one really knows what works except the engines. They create complicated algorithms to define how each search engine works and how it produces its rankings. SEO's, the general internet public (myself included) can merely guess at what actually works well and what doesn't.

It's also worth remembering that search engines often frequently change algorithm, and then it's back to the drawing board again.

Where do I go now?

I would suggest Part 3 – Search Engines – Getting Listed ;)

Author - Stuart Greig.

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