Search engines - Frequently
asked questions
|
|
What are search engines?
You
type in search engine what you are looking for and the search engine
then lists a number of websites that it thinks contain what you want.
Although nearly everyone who uses the Internet
uses search engines, a lot of people do not realise that they are doing
so.
Why should I submit my web site to search
engines?
Submiting to search engoines makes more traffic to your web site. About
80% - 85% of all web traffic comes through search engines. Most search
engines are free and fairly easy to use.
How long will it take for my site to listed?
Some search engines will list your web site within a few days or weeks
but usually it takes about five weeks.
How does a search engine know about the web sites on the
Internet?
Some search engines use "spiders" or search robots to search
the Internet and gather information about websites which is subsequently
recorded in the engine's database. If you dont want to wait for search
engine spiders, just submit your website into search engines.
What is a search engine friendly site?
A search engine friendly site is one that is readable to the search engine
spiders. Search engines are unable or limited on what they can view
in sites that are built in frames, flash or are made up of graphics.
What are spiders?
Spiders are software programs that search engines use to analyze your
web site's keywords and then validate them against your site's content.
Spiders follow all links from your page to other pages. The informations
that they get is returned to the search engine and indexed into
databases.
Automated or
manual submission?
Generally the best results are achieved from manual submissions
of web sites. It is a longer process, but the advantage
over automated submissions is it can result in a far higher acceptance
rate, because many of the top search engines refuse
submissions from software programs. And besides this, a lot of search
engines require manual submit site to categories. What is search engine optimization?
Indexing web page
in search engines is generally based on the web site title, density
of keywords on a page and the web page popularity. Search engine optimization
(SEO) is a set of methodologies aimed at improving the ranking of a website
in search engine listings.
What is the difference between a directory and a search engine?
A directory is organized by subjects similar to a book's table of contents.
Directories tend to have a small abstract for each of the entries,
so that you can use those abstracts to determine if the listings will
be able to help you. Directories usually have human editors ensuring
high quality of content, but they will tend to have a smaller searchable
database.
Why is search engine optimization so important?
You can expect traffic to grow
from 50% to 1000% after optimization.
How do I choose target keywords for search engine optimization?
You can use our Free keyword generator tool.
This tool also provides suggestions for related keyword phrases to help
you explore all the possible appropriate keyword phrases.
Should I separate keywords and keyword phrases in keyword
meta tag by commas?
The most common method is separating each
word or phrase by a comma.
Once registered in a Search Engine, how long will my site
remain in its database?
Forever in most search engines, unless your URL is changed or website
is not updated.
Is it true than search engines will ban web sites?
Yes - some search engines view spam techniques (Keyword spamming, Doorway
pages...) and may
ban the offending
web pages.
How
will HTML errors affect search engines?
Any errors in your HTML source code can cause severe problems, and destroy
your efforts to increase your search engine visibility. Your site may
appear broken to certain spiders, and even Internet users who are using
different browsers.
What is keyword density?
Keyword density is a calculation of the frequency of a keyword phrase
as a percentage of the total word count on a specific page.
How do I ensure that my site is viewable by different browsers
and search engine spiders?
The fastest way to ensure that your site will appear properly
is to view your site through different browsers, and to view your site
with older versions of those browsers.
When should I begin submiting my site?
The best time to submit your website is the
launch of your completed site, howeve rit is never too late to begin
submiting your web site.
How can a broken link on one of my web page effect search engines?
A search engine spider is a program that follows website links. A broken
link is a reference to a page which does not exist, so broken
links interrupt, or in some cases inhibit, indexing by search engine
spiders. If a link goes to nowhere, the spider
will reach a dead end and return home. This means that the spider will
not be able to check out the rest of your site, and possibly your site
will not be accepted into the search engines databases.
How
important is website title?
For most search engines, the title of a site is very important and it
can be the main factor as to how pages are indexed. Select a title
that contains the relevant keywords. Try to make title up to 40 characters
long.
What's a "META" search engine?
A meta search engine is a search tool that doesn't create its own
database of information, but instead searches those of other engines.
Can I submit dynamic pages?
The crawlers will be able
to crawl and index pages that are dynamically driven from URL parameters.
Search engines vs image maps?
The most of search engines
will not be able to follow navigation links that are set up in this
way because the spiders do not generate a "click" event to
allow the execution of the script that opens the nest page.
What is a web robot or web spider?
A spider is a program that automatically indexes web sites.
What is the difference between ethical and spam search engine
optimization?
There are plenty of firms who claim to submit your site to 15,000
search engine, but they often spam the search engines with submissions.
Ethical search engine optimization is the practice of presenting content
and
submissions the way the search engines want to accept and index information.
Why do I have to fill so much information to submit a webpage?
Taking a few minutes now to fill out the
information correctly will pay you dividends in hits later.
Do search engines spider the alt attribute for the <IMG> tag?
In most cases, no, but some search engines dp (Google). Using short,
relevant alt-text descriptions for your site will greatly enhance your
site's
visibility within the search engines.
What are doorway pages?
Doorwa pages are pages which send the user to a different page. Most
search engines do not
want to submit doorway pages.
How important are meta tags for search engines?
Today the meta tags are fairly irrelevant to getting a page ranked
high, but some search engines still do index the words within these
meta tags.
How
can I make my framed site search engine friendly?
Place the page's most important information between the <NOFRAMES> tags
(place links to the non-framed pages on your web site).
What is search engine optimization?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methodologies aimed at improving
the ranking of a website in search engine listings.
Are poor homepages bad for listings?
Some search engines or directories won't list site if it has a informationally
poor homepage. The home page may be the only page indexed and often ranks higher than other pages.
How important is website download time for search engines?
The
longer people have to wait for a site to come up, the less likely
they are going to stay on your site for long. Most Internet users will
assume that the site is broken if they have to
wait longer than 30 seconds for each page to load. Fast web page download
time is important for some search engines also.
What can I do to have my images load faster?
Try using smaller images and less
animations. Optimize image size (reduce image quality, reduce colors...).
Why do my web pages need to be optimized?
Search engines display search results by matching the search
terms that a web user types in with webpages that exist in
their database. If your content does not match what the web user
is searching for your website may not be included in search results.
What about flash wesites and flash animations vs search engines?
Search engines can't spider flash websites at the moment.
Some directories will also penalise the use of flash if it takes too
long to download.
Don't use a browser plug-in redirect and instead of it provide a button
for the user to choose the html or flash version of your website.
|
