UNDERSTANDING SEARCH ENGINES
Search Engine Spiders
A search engine sends a spider or bot to your website to collect information to add to its index. This spider crawls over the Web. It follows links on your website to internal and external pages. It then make copies of the pages, strips away the code, and interprets the remaining text. Ultimately your pages are scored and associated to certain words.
Meanwhile, users visiting popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing will enter specific words or phrases looking for related web pages. So how do you get listed in their top results?
Getting a high rank (PageRank) in the Google search engine (URL: www.google.com) will help you get listed in their top results. It is different from being indexed. PageRank is a method Google uses to measure the importance of a web page. It assigns a value on a scale from 0 to 10 (with 10 being the best). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRanks receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page, there is no support for that page.
The quality of the incoming links to your site is critical to PageRank. Five links from reputable, legitimate sites are worth more than a hundred links from questionable sites that provide no real service. The Google search engine will evaluate your PageRank, page contents, hyperlinks, navigation structure, and age of your site, along with other factors, then determine where to list your page in their results. Learn more about incoming web site links.
GoogleBot can find most pages on the Internet. But you can also submit your site for free. Click to Submit your site to Google . However, Google can take up to 3-6 months to improve your ranking after it initially indexes it. To find out more about how Google crawls and indexes websites, go to Webmaster Central.
YouTube
YouTube (URL: www.YouTube.com) is not just a video-sharing website, it is the world's #2 search engine.
And now businesses are getting on board and uploading videos to YouTube. Educational resource videos are especially popular since people now search the web for help and advice. Businesses now post YouTube videos to share their knowledge and connect with potential customers. These days, your business should be as easy to find on YouTube as well as on Google.
You can start capturing a video even if you don’t have a camcorder. Nowadays, most people have cell phones with video-capturing capabilities. You can also use a computer with a built-in webcam, or an external webcam that you can connect to your computer.
If you are getting ready to create your first business YouTube video, you should keep a few things in mind. First, try to keep your video recording relatively short—ideally between 3-5 minutes. Be sure to add relevant content that is meaningful to your audience. It's about connecting and building trust with them. The more visitors watch and respond to your video, the higher your YouTube ranking will be.
Your video's title, description and tags also play a key role, as do the quality and number of incoming links, visitors' click-through rates, bounce rates etc.. Did you know that YouTube keeps track of the number of times a video has been viewed, how long users have stayed watching a video and at which point they left? Be sure your video content is interesting, engaging, and compelling enough to make people watch it, rate it, and comment on it. And be sure to promote it on your website and your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
YAHOO
The Yahoo search engine (URL: www.yahoo.com) is content oriented. If you are disappointed in your Yahoo! ranking, consider adding more content to your site. One way to do that is to simply add more fresh content pages to your website. As you add more pages, there are more entries for search engine spiders, and for visitor traffic, to find your site. It may also be helpful to add a site map. You need to make the entry paths to your site easy for the Yahoo! spider. It doesn't appear to crawl as deeply, or as often, as the Google spider.
Adding a blog (web pages where entries are made in journal style) to your website is also beneficial. Blogs are well treated by the search engines because of their regular fresh keyword rich content and with numerous incoming links. Yahoo!, in particular, treats blogs well, even more so than Google.
Their search crawler, Yahoo! Slurp, can find most pages on the Internet easily. Yahoo! also offers several ways for content providers to submit web pages and content directly to the Yahoo! Search index and the Yahoo! Directory.
BING
Bing (formerly Live Search, Windows Live Search, MSN Search) is the current web search engine from Microsoft. Bing provides a general search and a category search. It also shows a preview of web pages in the search results when you hover your mouse pointer over the right side of the search results. Bing (URL: www.Bing.com) also features a different background image every day. The image contains special hidden hotspots that lead you to more information.
Bing is similar to Google in the sense that it likes to see inbound links to a website. Page content and clean coding are other important factors to Bing. If a website's code is poorly written, it appears that Bing downgrades the site's search rankings heavily. Internal site links are also noticed. Be sure to link extensively within the site and use strong link anchor text related to the content of the receiving page.
Generally their web crawler, MSNBot, can find most pages on the Internet. However if your site does not appear on Bing, you can send them your web page URL. Submit site to Bing.
Social Media and Search Engine Results
The future trends of internet are rapidly changing. Incoming links from Social Media websites like Facebook and Twitter can now dramatically affect your website's ranking in search engine results. Social media is a very easy and convenient method of sharing and connecting with people all over the globe. It is also an easy and effortless process to help you reach your prospective customers. Just make sure you are able to use it wisely. Everything you post should be fun, relevant to your chosen topic, and something that you think your readers will enjoy.
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