The Importance of Search Engines

A search engine is like the local Yellow Pages book.  Whereas the Yellow Pages only contains listings in your area, a search engine offers world wide reach.   Each uses robots or spiders that crawl the web in search of pages to index in their database.  Search engines are driven by keywords as this is what a user types in the box to find the content they are looking for.  While keyword implementation and link popularity play a major role in getting your site to rank well, manually submitting your site is equally important.

Google and Yahoo

Google and Yahoo are easily the two most significant search engines on the web.  Although Google is arguably the most popular, Yahoo is often deemed as the best.  When performing identical searches in both engines, you will find that Yahoo gives you a lot of results Google looks over.  Be that as it may, both should be at the top of your list for search engine submission.  If your site isn’t listed here, you are missing out on a great deal of traffic.

MSN

A relatively new option, MSN is a search engine developed by Microsoft.  Though not as popular as Google and Yahoo, getting your site listed in MSN is equally important as it has become the third highest ranked search engine on the market.  With this search engine, you can either submit your site via Live Search or Submit Express, both of which are trusted links through MSN.

Lycos

Lycos is a combination of a search engine and online directory, quite similar to Yahoo.  It normally takes about four weeks to have your site listed which all depends on when you made the submission.  The Lycos search engine spiders typically operate every four weeks, so if you submit just before the next scheduled crawl, there is a chance that your site could get listed fairly quickly.

Looksmart

Looksmart is a search engine that specializes in commercial advertising.  This search engine is quickly gaining ground as more webmasters realize the benefit of online advertising.  The downside to Looksmart is that submitting your site will cost you a pretty penny along with a lengthy waiting period.  There is also an express service but this of course, is priced much higher.  Non-profit organizations can submit their sites on Looksmart for free.

Northern Light

The Northern Light search engine is becoming increasingly popular as it indexes all new site submissions in about three to four weeks.  This search engine is extremely easy to use and submitting to it will cost you nothing.

When submitting to a search engine, make sure the description of your site is longer than 24 words.  Avoid using HTML tags as well as any descriptions that can be viewed as marketing terms.  A submission will not guarantee you top ranking on the front page of Google, but is that first critical step to getting some decent exposure for your site.

Take Advantage of Meta Tegas

The MSNBot actively uses meta tags a part of its web page analysis.  Like other search engines, the title tag is weighed the heaviest within the indexing algorithm, followed up by the meta description tag.  It is recommended to insert your chosen keywords into both areas.  Although Microsoft has never stated that the MSNBot utilizes keyword meta tags, experts strongly suggest that keywords should be included in the title, description, tags and content.  In addition, keywords placed in these areas should all adhere to one another.

Keep Page Size to a Minimum

The MSN search engine requires that your pages are no more than 150k in size.  This gives indication that the bot with either stop scanning or may simply skip over the page entirely.  The good thing is that a web page with a size of 150k has enough room to contain a considerable amount of relative text.  Keep in mind that if you plan to add a lot of fancy graphics, the size of your pages will expand greatly.  Similar to other search engines, MSN prefers text over graphics so you always want to keep them to a minimum.

Efficient Linking

As you would expect, links are an important equation of the MSNBot’s indexing algorithm.  Microsoft offers two suggestions on what type of links will be deemed the most essential: links on the home page or your website, and links that are no more than three levels deep.  This simply means that all the links on your site should be accessible within three or less clicks from one another for maximum efficiency.  Although this could be a problem for larger sites, MSN says its bot will offer a deeper crawl as the search engine becomes more sophisticated.

Submit Your Site

Some of the experts will tell you that search engine submissions are no longer significant while others say they are still important.  We will tell you that every effort helps.  Microsoft allows you to submit your site at no cost but there are some factors to consider.  First, you should check and see if your site is already indexed in the MSN database.  If so, resubmitting will be nothing but a waste of time.  Secondly, MSN requires that you manually submit your website.  This is a fairly simple process as all you have to do is enter the provided code along with your URL into the appropriate field.

Google and Yahoo are the leading search engines, but increasing your visibility in MSN can help you attract a broader range of targeted traffic.  Growing more popular by the year, optimizing for this search engine is definitely worth it.