CONTENTS

1. Introduction

1.1 What is an Internet search engine?

1.2 Growing importance of search engines
1.3 Major search engines

2. Search Engine Features

2.1 Design
2.2 Technology
2.3 Optimization
2.4 Spamming
2.5 Size

3. Search Engine Function

3.1 Google
3.2 Yahoo

4. Search Engine Ranking System

5. Search Engine Resources

5.1. Resource for Users

5.1.1 Utilities

5.2. Resource for Webmasters

5.2.1 Google
5.2.2 Yahoo
5.2.3 URL Checkers
5.2.4 Online Promotion
5.2.5 Adding search to your site

6. Web Search

6.1 Researching Keywords

6.2 Search Guide
6.2.1 For users
6.2.2 For webmasters
6.3 Keywords

7. Web Submission

7.1 Submitting to Directories

7.2 Submitting To Crawlers
 7.3 Submitting via Paid Listings

8. Search Engine Glossary

Conclusion
 1. Introduction

The World Wide Web (WWW) is an unlimited treasure of information catering for the
needs of its users. With the availability of billions of web pages on the Internet, it has
obviously become very difficult for a user to get particular information he/she needs from
it. Searching for specific information in the vast platform of the Internet is like searching a
pin in the haystack. A user, while searching for the required information, will certainly
waste his/her valuable hours navigating largely irrelevant websites, plus at length gets
frustrated. All these gave rise to discover a powerful tool called "Internet Search Engine".

1.1 What is an Internet Search Engine?

An Internet Search Engine (E.g. Google.com) is an automated software device, which

indexes documents on the Web. It is a tool that extracts the required information from
the websites it has in its database and enlists before the user according to its algorithms.

As the primary job a Search Engine is extracting information, it searches for the required
information from the websites it has in its database, based on the words or phrases
(keywords) used to search the needed information. So, the words or phrases play a vital
role in matching the search criteria. While supplying the required information, a search
engine basically performs three jobs viz., searching the internet basing on the keywords;
keeping an index of the words it finds and where it finds them; and allowing the users to
look for words or combinations of words found in that index.

Search results and rankings:

A majority of the web -surfers depend on search engines to find their needed topics as
well as to explore new websites. Most of the surfers get off to the first top 20 or 30
search results, even though search engines put forth thousands of results. As such,
unless a website is placed in the top 20-30 search results, it is not likely to be recognized
by the bulk of users, despite its coverage of potential information. Many websites use
"Spam" techniques to fool the search engines into awarding high ratings to inappropriate
pages by emulating the criteria followed by the search engines in ranking the sites. This
possibly affects the reliability of search engine query results. But, now the search
engines have become aware of these tricks and these sites are restricted from
appearing in the result pages.

When a word or phrase is entered in a search box, the search engine gets the web
pages contained in its database and presents to the user, which are automatically sorted
by their feasible significance. The web pages or websites appear according to their
"relevancy" with the words or phrases used. Later the search engine lists or ranks the
resulting sites in order of its own assessment, which are often company coverts. Hence
the ranking of the sites are enigmatic.

Factors for good results:

Search engines give due importance to the websites according to two factors: website's
content and its external position. There are probable chances for a website for getting
listed top depending on its content prepared sheltering best word frequency, location of
search terms or keywords, proximity and design. The external factors are: link
popularity; click popularity; sector popularity; business popularity; and pay-for-placement
rankings, which produce maximum chances for being listed in top results. However, a
faithful appraisal of a search engine's skill and database is identified by its ability in
providing results and how the search process and results set weight against its rival
search engines.

Besides finding information, the search engine is a significant promotional tool for
valuable business and marketing channel.

How search engine works?

There are different ways of operating the search engines such as using the automatic
software programs known as spiders, worms, robots and gatherers, which crawl into the
web pages they have, and collect the URLs or addresses of the websites, contrary to
"Directories" (E.g. Yahoo.com) that are compiled by humans assessed and categorized
according to human decisions. Most of the search engines are free. Some search
engines update their database daily and some are paid for their services.

With the increase of the usage of search engines by the Internet users and with the
search engine competitive listings, the top-ranked websites equivalently get amazing
rise in traffic and eventually their businesses go up. But it depends chiefly on the
strategic procedure called Optimization or Search Engine Optimization. Unless a website
is essentially optimized, it is hard for it to be listed in the top 20-30 ranks and to tap
potential visitors.

1.2 Growing Importance of Search Engines

Business perspective:

These days Internet-based business has tremendously been increasing,

simultaneously giving a scope for terrific online competition. Firms are highly
concerned about achieving their targeted ends and vying with their competitors in
their respective businesses. Their concern and competition mainly rests upon
increasing the inflow of the traffic to their websites, the core point of the business.
Since 85% of the Internet users use search engines for the information they are
looking for, search engines play a vital role in bringing potential traffic to the websites.
Thus Search engines are gaining strength as a medium of marketing and as a link
between the customer and the vendor (website), and consequently the importance of
search engines is growing swiftly.

Another important thing to note is that a customer is 2000% more likely to access a
website through a search engine than by any other means of online advertisement .
According to a survey, one in 28 pages viewed on the Internet is a search engine
result page. It is also interesting to note that the epoch of propagating business
through online banners and ads has almost come to an end since online ads and
banners are highly expensive. As most of the business firms operate upon a budget,
they look forward for some economical means of publicizing their businesses, which
can be achieved through search engines. Further 55% of online business originates
from search engines and without spending much on advertisements. Aren’t the above
substantiates the growing importance of the search engine? Lets go through the
following chart to understand clearly.

60%
Percentage of Online
50% Purchases
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
55% 16% 30%
Search Banners Others
Engine & Ads

Information perspective:

Apart from the business perspective, the information field towers on the Web. News,
articles, greetings, movies, matrimonials, etc., are some of the major stores on the
Web where there is a lot of offbeat competition among the websites with the surfers
going for credible information and latest knowledge. The information-based websites
are equally competing with their business counterparts and are trying to get
increasing traffic. They are undertaking the task of Optimization of their sites and
submitting them to the search engines to yield potential traffic. Thus, here also
search engine has a great importance unlike there in the business field as a “link-
between”.

The importance within:

With both the business and information fields swathing the search engines, there
materializes a bizarre competition within the search engines with the different search
engines display different rankings and ratings, which inversely contributes to the
importance of search engine. For example, a search engine lists a web page on
sports shoes according to its own algorithms, while another search engine may rank it
lower or higher or even may rank another webpage, also based on its own methods. It
means there is a pretty competition within the search engines for the one product,
sports shoes; and where there is a competition there grows a pretty good importance
of the competitors (search engines). A search engine may display the highest credible
result of a web page compared to another search engine and a user may usually go
to the highest-ranked web page which results in the increase of traffic to the website,
 as well as importance and credit to the search engine. Thereby the importance of the
high-and-credible-ranks awarding search engine escalates.

1.3 Major Search Engines

The following search engines are considered as the Major Search Engines on the Web.
Predominantly, the search engines list web pages based on the automated "Spiders"
that crawl over the Web, except in the case of "Open Directory and Yahoo" as their
listings are compiled by human editors. These search engines are used largely by both
surfers and webmasters for various dependable results. They are often upgraded to
keep pace with the increasing web and to generate potential web traffic to different sites.

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AOL Search searches across the web as well as
its own content. Its main listings for categories and
AOL Search websites are from the Open Directory. Inktomi
also provides crawler-based results as backup to
the directory information.
Altavista is considered to be one of the largest
search engines. It covers comprehensive and
AltaVista extensive power searching commands helpful for
both surfers and webmasters. It also lists results
from Ask Jeeves, Open Directory and LookSmart
Ask Jeeves gets exact information asked for, and
if it fails to find relevant page to the query, then it
AskJeeves provides matching web pages from various search
engines. It is a human-powered search service.
Some of its results match with AltaVista results.
Direct Hit, owned by Ask Jeeves, serves its own
search results as well as its partner sites results,
such as HotBot. It rates sites on the basis of the
DirectHit response they had from the visitors when
compared to other sites. It provides main results,
which appear at HotBot, and is also available as
an option to searchers at MSN Search.
Launched in 1995, Excite serves with a large
index and displays non-web material like company
Excite information and sports scores in its results. It has
acquired a fair name for search services on the
web.
Google has gained extensive acclamation for its
high "relevancy". It contains huge index and
provides some results to Yahoo and Netscape
Google search. While ranking websites, Google
abundantly uses link popularity, which helps in
finding good sites in response to general
searches.
 HotBot has many power-search features. Mostly,
its primary search listings are displayed from the
Direct Hit service, and the secondary results are
HotBot
displayed from the Inktomi search engine. It gets
its directory information from the Open Directory
Project.
Inktomi was first used to power HotBot, but now
its index powers several other services. It provides
Inktomi a common index to its partners. Its services
cannot be availed directly, but only through its
partners.
Launched in 1999, iWon is backed by US
television network CBS. It has a directory
iWon
generated automatically by Inktomi along with its
crawler-based results.
Lycos Search mainly depends on its "Spider" that
spiders across the web. Its listings also constitute
Lycos/FAST
results from Open Directory, FAST search engine
and Direct Hit results.
LookSmart, an independent service, is a directory
of websites compiled by human beings. It provides
directory results to MNS Search, Excite and many
LookSmart
other search engines. When it fails to find a
match from its database, the n Inktomi provides it
with the search results.
MSN Search directory is powered by LookSmart
MSN search engine. Its secondary results come from
Search Inktomi. RealNames and Direct Hit also help the
MSN Search.
Featuring a large index on the web, Northern Light
is able to gather documents by topic and it also
has a set of "special collection" documents from
Northern thousand sources including newswires,
Light magazines and databases. One can search them
for free, but has to pay $4 to view them. However,
there is no charge to view documents on the
public web.
Open Directory, formerly known as NewHoo,
displays results compiled by human editors.
Open
Acquired by Netscape in 1998, presently Open
Directory
Directory information can be used by anyone
Project
through an open license arrangement. ODP is
(ODP)
also used profusely by Lycos and AOL search
engines.
Yahoo search, the oldest major website directory,
is the largest guide compiled by human beings. It
Yahoo!
has over 1 million sites. If it fails to find a match,
then the results are supplemented by Google.
 Yahoo matches are followed by Google matches.

Search Engine classification:

Since there are a number of Search Engines available on the Web, depending on their
scope and capabilities to carry out a search, they are classified into several types. Some
of them are classified as follows:

1. General Search Engines is a collection of general-interest search engines, directories,

Meta search engines and child-safe search tools. E.g., Yahoo!, AltaVista.

2. World Search Engines include engines that are specific to India, Britain, the United
States, Canada and other countries in the five different continents. E.g.,
searchindia.com.

3. Topical Search Engines are helpful while searching for a specific topic. You can here
have the latest information regarding several topics like Health, Career, Sports, Women,
Computers, Internet, Science and Technology, Tourism, Education, etc.

4. Reference Sites focus on specific topics ranging from education to employment.

Hybrid search engines:

Hybrid search engines are new generation Search Engines, which are a combination of
a directory and a search engine to give their visitors the most appropriate and total
search listings. The top ten search sites are hybrid search engines. For example:
Though Yahoo! was started as a directory, it appends search results from Google, an
automated search engine, to its physically compiled results. On the other hand, Google
uses Open Directory Project's directory (complied by humans) to enrich its listings.

Multimedia Search Engines:

Multimedia Search Engines are a kind of functional and exclusive search engines used
to locate sounds, images or video files from different WebPages. Some of the
Multimedia Search Engines are:

1. AltaVista Photo Finder is a remarkable service that lists a collection of images,

audio and video clips over the web. For the convenience of the web users, these
results include thumbnail view of the images listed. If you look for an image like
“Pearls”using this, it cannot understand what pearls are. Instead it relies on the
words or text seen around the image or in the file name to understand the
contents of the image.

2. FAST Multimedia Search locates and lists images, audio and video files from the
indexed files of FAST Search. You can narrow down your search for specific
kinds of formats with extensions like .jpg, .bmp, .gif, .mp3, .wav, etc.

3. Lycos Pictures and Sounds is a multimedia search service powered by Lycos.

You can view thumbnails of the images based on a category from the
PicturesNow Catalog.
4. AltaVista's MP3/Audio Search service provides sound listings from its indexes
collected by crawling both web and FTP sites along with those available from
partner sites such as CDNow and MP3.com.

5. Google Image Search analyses the text surrounding the image, the image
caption, file name and other things while determining the contents of the image. It
also uses sophisticated algorithms to remove duplicates and to make sure that
the highest quality images are presented first to you in its results.

6. StreamSearch.com provides you a directory of multimedia resources of different

categories.

7. Audiofind.com lets you browse for MP3 files on the b asis of artiste or genre.
 2. Search Engine Features

2.1. Search Engine Design

As far as design is concerned most of the websites are poorly designed even though
they are at an advantage over other pages having the best content and being eligible for
better search engine placements and online promotion, and thereby loose potential
traffic. For best listings on the search engines plus to acquire traffic, ideal design is a
must before submitting to search engines. Some of the techniques are mentioned
hereunder for better designing.

Selecting and positioning Keywords

The primary aspect of the design is selecting the accurate keywords for a company or
information websites. If you have a company website, go for the services it aims to
provide or products and select some keywords that best describe the website. Ensure
how your customers search your website and what keywords in general and in particular
they use to have your information or service. Also see how your competitors are being
listed top on the search engines. Prepare your keywords keeping in mind all these
details.

After you are done with picking up right and accurate keywords, move on to then
placement of strategic keywords in the web pages. Remember to include appropriate
words in the page title. One significant reason why a website is poorly ranked is due to
the placement of inappropriate keywords in the titles. When a web page is created
accommodating relevant keywords, there are possible chances for a website to be listed
in the top search results.

Keywords should reflect content

Unless the keywords are reflected in the content, the web page will not work well even if
it has good page content and the meta tags well placed. Also when a page is loaded
with larger sections of graphics or image maps or frames the search engines, while
searching, prettily misses them out since they cannot read such things. So in such case
using HTML text will be more helpful. But remember that the text should be visible, for
the repeated invisible keywords with tiny font or the same background color text are
considered to be spamming for which act your page may not be indexed.

Problem with Tables and frames

One of the major causes for the poor display of a website in search results is tables and
frames. It is because search engines cannot read them and thus the text becomes less
relevant to the keywords. So to avoid this use meta tags and beat the problems with
tables and frames. Also using meta tags you can control your site’s description in the
search engines. However, there is no warranty that meta tags help you list in the top
results.

Add References
Give suitable references to your text. For example, how to get proper sleep page may
be given references as “sleep well”and “sleeping”. With this, the references emphasize
your keywords in a legitimate manner without any scope for spamming.

HTML hyperlinks

Most of the search engines cannot follow image map links from the home page to inside
pages and unfortunately the search engines miss to get the inside pages. To prevent
such trouble, create links to your pages from the home page and place them down at the
bottom of the page. These HTML hyperlinks will help the search engines to follow the
relevant pages.

Prepare site map

Also, prepare a site map page with text links to everything in your site, as it helps the
search engines to find pages within the website.

Never go for spamming

While designing your website for search engines, bear in mind all the practices that are
considered spamming by the search engines. Spamming is a kind of work that facilitates
a website to be ranked well in the search engines “temporarily”. When a search engine
finds out the spamming, the spammed website is excluded from the search results and
is also penalized. Instead of spamming, go for hard work and creativity.

Monitor listing

Once you are listed in a search engine results, keep checking your pages to find out
what is happening to them. Sometimes pages may disappear from catalogs or links may
go wild. So check them out and make necessary changes. Also see that a number of
search engines are now filtering websites by country-specific domains. For instance, a
website with Indian domain “.co.in.” may be filtered out. When you find this type of
situation, inform the search engines to include your website manually.

When you make significant changes to your website, resubmit it so as to be current with
the content. Most of the websites change their content once or twice in a year. As
search engines have grown smarter to update their database, they may visit your site
less often.

2.2 Search Engine Technology

What is Web Search?

Web Search is a process of receiving a query from a web user, taking the query form as
parameters, searching for the terms, collecting the results according to a prearranged
setting and listing them.

Search Indexing
The Search Indexer is the application, which reads the text of the documents to be
searched and stores them in a competent searchable form called the Index also known
as Catalog.

Local File Indexers

Local File Indexer finds a file by monitoring the directory structure of the hard drive,
typically starting with the web server root directory. They index the files basing on their
location in the directory.

Updating Local File Indexes

The local file indexers, while updating, check the system update date for the file, and
index new or modified files only. Some tightly-linked operating system indexers will even
be informed about file changes and creation in the particulars folders and will only
update index entries for those files.

Duplicate Files

Local file indexers are smarter enough to remove duplicate pages. That’s why search
results do not have duplication of the same webpage. If duplication is to be done, they
should properly decide symbolic links, shortcuts, pseudonyms or other local file system
ways of storing a reference to a file in another location.

Dynamic Elements

Local file indexers gets the web page exactly as it appears on the local disk without the
dynamic content from CGIs (Common Gateway Interface), SSI (Server -side includes),
ASP (active server pages) and the like. Additionally, these pages will not be marked as
modified, unless the content of the page has modified.

Spider indexing

Spiders or robots, or bots, or crawlers, or gatherers, are a kind of software programs,

which perform the job of a secret agent. Their work is to request and retrieve the
documents from the web servers, automatically index and include into their database. In
case of directories, there is no robot or spider as they are examined and indexed by
human editors.

When a new document is picked up by the spider, the document is scanned for links,
and these links are either navigated forthwith or set for later retrieval.

It is not surprising to understand that spiders can never touch the pages that are
customized via cookies or pages using any JavaScript or Java tricks that affect their
index and also cannot understand frames. What they get is pure HTML source stripped
off all markup and tags.

Robot Spider updating

The spiders update the websites they have already indexed in their databases based on
the periods of updation, which may vary from one week to several months according to
the respective schedules by the search engines. Some robot spiders, to update the
indexes, query the web server about the position of each linked page by requesting for
the HTTP header using a “HEAD” request. The server replies the query by filling the
HEAD request from an internal cache, without opening and reading the entire file. Then
the robot spider compares the modified date from the header with its own last modified
date. If the date has been changed, or if it is new and has not yet been indexed, the
robot will then send a GET request (the usual request for an HTML page) and store
every word.

As the robot spider indexers use HTTP, they can be slower than local file indexers and
can stress your web server asking for each page. They do not locate pages unlinked
from any of your starting points.

2.3 Search Engine Optimization

Getting listed in the top search results is not a great achievement, but a persistent and
complex process of making your site most effective, functional and reliable and capable
of mustering those visitors who are looking for the right things that your site provides.
Optimization not only helps attract more visitors but also distinguishes your site from
other sites.

Keywords and Title

To get listed in the top results as well as to gather right type of visitors, keywords play a
major role since the searchers find the websites through words or phrases. So, if your
web page contains some specific information or product, keeping this in mind, find out at
least 20-25 keywords or phrases that speak about your web pages information or
product. Then cut them down to no more than 3 keywords that most accurately speak
about the content. Your phrases also should be no more than a combination of 3 -4
words. Now these curtailed keywords form the main basis through which your site is
visited.

The title is the key thing that describes about what your website stands for. So select a
right title that best conveys about your website to your potential visitors. Do some
research and pick up the 3 main keywords or 2-3 keyword phrases and construct a title
which should be creative and emphasize the theme of your site. To understand it clearly
lets take an example: Go for a major search engine and type there a word or a phrase
about what you want. Top search results will be displayed. Click the first three or four
listings. Match the titles with your keyword or phrases you typed in the search engine.
You will indeed see that the titles match with the keywords and give the information you
need.

Various websites adopt wrong methods for optimizing their sites like using keywords
repeatedly or employ inappropriate keywords for highest relevancy in the search
engines. Such sites are penalized and often barred from getting listed by the search
engines characterizing the act as “Spamming. So care should be taken while choosing
right titles and keywords that characterize the contents of your site.

Doorway Pages
Some sites create a doorway page (also called as leader page, Jump page, Bridge
page, gateway page, portal page) with the words or phrases used in tags , titles and the
content of the page. Suppose, you have some 10 -20 most sought after keywords or
phrases which you think best describe various aspects of your page content and if you
think you cannot use all of them in the meta description tag then go for a doorway page
which optimizes these words. A doorway page directs the visitors to the actual page
they desire and is never seen by the web users. It can be an intensive source of
information rather than just targeting a search engine to appear in the top ranking
listings of search engines. Moreover, it offers a wide range of optimized keywords or
phrases through which a visitor can find the intended site. Since you cannot get
included in every search engine for every possible keyword, a doorway page, if
properly planned, takes up the task of a home page.

But doorway pages always may not click. Search engines may sometimes feel that
they are created to fool them and may consider one of the spamming techniques and
give you a lower score. However, there will not be any problem if they feel that the
keywords you submit in the doorway pages is relevant to your page content and you
are not attempting to mislead them. As long as your doorway pages are genuine, no
search engine will consider them as spam.

HTML tags

HTML tags influence the appearance of web page on the browser, and what ever you
see in the form of text or images is actually presented in the form of HTML tags. Using
these tags you can optimize your page.

1. Title tag

The Title is written in between <title> and </title> as: <title> Pilgrim places in
America </title>

The key words you frame depend on how you title your page. This title should
appear once in the keywords. It should not contain more than 40 characters or at least 6
words (not considering common words like “of”, “And”, “for”). A search engine lists the
title of your page and your domain name while displaying search results.

2. Put proper headings

Make sure that some of your keywords appear in the heading s tag so that the
search engines will catch them while indexing the pages. Headings are considered
highly by the search engines.

The headings in the page should be placed in between <h1> and </h1>, <h2> and
<h2> and the size of the text changes wi th the number.

<h1> Temples in America </h1>

<h2> Temples in California </h2>

3. Specify 'ALT' tags to all your images

<img src="xyz.jpg" ALT="This is one of the most visited places in America”>

Search engines decide the contents of the image on the basis of the text located around
it.

4. Meta tags

Many of us might have heard about Meta tags but only a few are aware of their use and
working. They ensure top rankings to your page. Meta tags are significant because a
search engine looks for them in your page in order to place it accurately in its index. If
you just create a home page and register your URL, without meta tags a search engine
cannot know the contents of your page and may find it difficult to list you properly. They
give the visitors a better view of what your page contains, who created it and help the
promotion of your website. Consider adding Meta Tags to the head of every single
webpage.

Meta tags are a part of the HTML tags that are not visible to the users but never affect
the appearance of your site. They are helpful not only in describing your page but also
distinguishing it from others.

Meta tags searched by a search engine include :

a. Meta keyword tag

<meta name=“keywords” content=“Pilgrim places in America”, “Temples", “Churches”,

“Mosques”, “Pilgrim places”>

This tag contains the keywords the visitors possibly look for in their page and the
search engine index the page based on these keywords.

b. Meta description tag

The <meta> description tag describes the contents of the page. It should contain the
description of the specific page.

<meta name="description" content="Get the details of Pilgrim places in America and

enjoy visiting them">

This tag should describe the specific page, and not the whole website. This is the
description of the page that shows up when the search engine searches a page. It’s
much better if the description is not more than about 300 characters long. Make it
descriptive, and ensure it contains your keywords or phrases.

c. META HTTP-EQUIV tag

<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="0; url=”homepage.htm">

This tag is used to refresh the contents of the site and redirect the browser to the
specified page after waiting for a specified time.

2.4. Spamming
What is Spamming?

Spam techniques are posing a greater challenge to the credibility of a search engine. A
deliberate act of modifying the contents of a document with the intention of duping the
search engine into conferring high ratings to irrelevant web pages in order to attract
more web navigators can be regarded as spamming or spamdexing or spoofing.

Search engines aim at providing reliable results to the web users. However, because of
these practices their indices are muddled with extraneous information. These techniques
help enhance the relative position of a site at the expense of the quality and services of
the search engine's database but significantly reduce their reliability and usage. The
result is the listing of inappropriate and unsolicited bulk of web material.

Practices considered spamming

Earlier, search engines were committing mistakes by awarding ranks to some of the
improper pages for their higher keyword relevance. But now search engines have
become intelligent enough to find out these techniques. In fact, some of the web pages
are excluded for their awful practices that are indeed considered spamming by the major
search engines. The following methods are some of the unpleasant attempts to ensure
high ratings for their sites.

- Inappropriate or Superfluous use of keywords in the page

- Keeping text in minute fonts or Invisible text (the background color and the
text color being the same, users cannot see it but a search engine can identify it)
- Presence of ambiguous descriptive words about a page's content in the meta
description tag.
- Redundant use of keywords, though irrelevant to the page's actual content to
deceive the search engines.
- Using a meta refresh tag with a setting less than 30 seconds.
- Submitting identical pages, either from the same site or from mirror sites (same
sites pointing different URLs)
- Submitting more than one page on a single day
- Irrelevant title or sub-headings
- Submitting for improper categories
- Creating artificial links to manipulate the ranking list
- Excessive use of frames and dynamic co ntent

How major search engines react to spamming

Some of the major search engines exclude these pages from appearing in their listings
or award extensive penalties for carrying out spamming techniques and misleading their
indices.

- Google does not count the relevancy of the page if the text is very tiny or very
large. It disregards the page or imposes heavy penalties.
- Altavista awards penalties to the sites that try to influence the rankings by
adopting spam techniques.
- Inktomi excludes the pages from its listings.
- Also those sites that resort to these practices are disallowed from further
submitting their pages.
- Suspicious pages are first blocked and removed from the listings. Further, they
are submitted for a review by human editors.

Avoid spamming

Following the spam techniques you can make your pages appear in the first pages of
search listings temporarily, but once you are found you will be banned or penalized
severely for the crime. Not only search engines reject your pages but also visitors hate
you. Instead work hard to give out the quality content and strive for permanent
placement in the first 10-20 listings which ensure visitors to your site all through. If your
site contains a large number of pages and if you think search engines cannot index them
appropriately, create a few workaround pages. These pages should reflect your
products, services and care should be taken that they are optimized properly.

2.5 Search Engine Sizes

Size of different search engines

Web became a necessity these days and search engines have become the major tools,
which can efficiently grab the information from the sites and present the best information
available to the user. This compelled the search engines to compete with each other
while reaching out to the visitors in the best possible way and providing exact results.
The larger the size of the index of a search engine, the wider it will cover the web and
provide high quality results.

The following chart shows the sizes of some of the major search en gines. From this
chart, it is evident that Google is having the largest index covering more than 2000
million pages over the web followed by FAST which covers about 625 million web pages.
A visitor while looking for rare information on the web may think of using a search engine
with a large index, which means a wider coverage of web and a greater amount of
information. Since Google uses wide links while looking for a site, it indexes a large
number of sites though it has never visited them actually.
Does size matter?

While a person looks for general information, he/she can as well use a search engine
that has got smaller index because large index does not essentially mean accurate
results. Even if a search engine lists thousands of results, a visitor can probably visit
only the first 20-30 sites that are listed high in its rankings. The problem is even though a
search engine’s capacity to list thousands of results has increased, the viewer’s
capability to view them has not increased much. Most of the people are restricted to the
first few results. So, to be efficient, it is not just enough if a search engine has got large
index, but it should be able to make effective use of its storage space to store the index.
Precision is more important than the number of results returned by it. Google is a good
example for this. Its data structures are optimized for fast and efficient access.
Moreover, the greater the amount of text to be stored, the lower will be the cost involved.

Storage Requirements

Apart from maintaining greater search quality, Google is designed to scale effectively the
size of the Web as it grows. One aspect of this is using its storage efficiently. The
following table shows some statistics and storage requirements of Google. Due to
compression, the total size of the repository is about 53 GB, just one -third above the
total data it stores. The total data used by the search engine requires about 55 GB.
Furthermore, most queries can be answered using just the short inverted index. With
better encoding and compression of the Document Index, a high quality web search
engine may fit onto a 7GB drive.

STORAGE SUMMARY
Total Size of Fetched Pages 147.8 GB
Compressed Repository 53.5 GB
Short Inverted Index 4.1 GB
Full Inverted Index 37.2 GB
Lexicon 293 MB
Temporary Anchor Data (not in total) 6.6 GB
Document Index Incl.
9.7 GB
Variable Width Data
Links Database 3.9 GB
Total Without Repository 55.2 GB
Total With Repository 108.7 GB
 4. Search Engine Ranking System

Recently, some of the major search engines - AltaVista, Excite, Google, Lycos, Yahoo -
have adopted a new ranking system that will follow and rank websites basing o n the
links pointing to a particular website including the links quality. With this, the search
engines not only rank websites by keyword relevancy, meta tags, title and text, but also
consider overall popularity of the website. With this recent ranking techniques, creating
quality links to a website has become a necessity for getting top ranks in the search
engines.

What is Search Engine Ranking?

Search Engine Ranking is a process of awarding ranks to a particular top search result
of a web page of a web site by a search engine basing on its rules and methods.

Most of the users, to search for anything, go for their favorite search engines assuming
that they can get most appropriate results. When giving out the search results for the
information requested for by their faithful users, many search engines rank
simultaneously the relevant result in a hierarchical order. However, if the result is
ranked top, there is no assurance that the same result may get the same or higher rank
subsequently, since search engines cannot count on the decision they once take and
look for past ranking. This means, that search engines follow their own algorithms to run
their respective ranking systems perfectly. Most of the search engines’rules primarily
include location and frequency of keywords on a web page for their search result
rankings.

Location and frequency of keywords

First of all search engines look through the appearance of the keyword in the title and
when the keyword appears in the title, they take that web page for result and ranking. If
it is not the case, then the search engines move to check the keywords near the top of a
web page such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of the text.

Frequency is said to be the density of the keywords in a web page. Those web pages
having higher frequency are typically considered as more relevant to the search query.

To most of the search engines, location and frequency is like a blueprint on which their
results and rankings are formally based. Yet, it is mysterious why all the search engines
don't provide same result and ranking of a particular website in their respective results.
Most probably, as said, search engines have their own set of rules on which they work.
Hence, the results differ from one search engine to another. For instance, to
WebCrawler link popularity is a vital factor for ranking. WebCrawler considers the page
having many links to it and regards it for its results and rankings.

Hybrid Search Engine Rankings

Many hybrid search engines - combination of search engines and directories - give
precedence to the websites that they have reviewed. It is good enough to know that the
websites that have earned a review will probably be more relevant for the results and
rankings, when compared to those sites that are not reviewed.

Meta Tags Mystery

Most of the web-designers assume that meta tags are the " hidden mystery" behind the
top rankings of the web pages. But their assumption is not substantiated by HotBot and
Infoseek since they go for keywords in their meta tags. Also, Excite cannot read meta
tags at all and thus many web pages without having meta tags still do high on it.
However, meta tags have their own importance applicable to those search engines that
consider them.

Ranking Vs Spamming

One surprising performance of the search engines while ranking the web pages is that,
they will never consider web pages created under disgusting Spam techniques and may
also penalize the spammed-pages. Those pages created under Spam such as words
repeated hundreds of times, words repeated in tiny or invisible fonts, or created with
same background color in order to be ranked well, will be reviewed thoroughly in various
ways and filtered out.

How to be ranked well

Search engines frequently change and polish up their formulas or algorithms to provide
better and more accurate results to their users. Therefore, no one can strongly say that a
website may continuously score well on a particular search engine. However, most of
the search engines have disclosed some of their ways of considering a website for better
performance on them which include the following techniques:

a) Webpages considered for top search results will have viewable text and
frequency and location of keywords near the top of the page. Pages having these will
have a plus point of being significantly placed in top search results.

b) Some search engines consider grammar in their reckoning the results. So,
simply repeating a keyword without any grammatical structure may not probably be
considered for best search results by the relevant search engines.

c) Ratio of the keywords to all other words in a web page is also an important
aspect of many search engines. To understand clearly, ratio is the density of the word
relative to the total size of the page. Many search engines prefer shorter pages as they
may have keywords in a greater relative frequency.

d) When a particular item is searched using a phrase and is not found, search
engines go for the words close to the item, which is called as "proximity of keywords".
So, proximity of keywords is under the purview of search engines. Also, some search
engines find for words “synonymous or similar”to the keywords in the webpages.

e) Some search engines determine results based on the site popularity as to how
many other websites have link with that website.

f) Almost all search engines consider spam-free webpages.

g) Search engines such as HotBot and Infoseek award higher rankings to pages
with keywords in their meta tags.
 5. Search Engine Resources

5.2.3. URL Checkers

What is URL checking?

URL checking is done to ensure that your site is listed in the indexes of major search
engines. Some of the search engines enable you to do it easily with the help of a few
commands and if your page is in their index, it will be instantly displayed. They were
also intended to validate the rankings of web pages, i.e., to allow you to learn how
your site ranks for different keywords. URL checkers help you check for the position
of your site in the index of a search engine. Sometimes it happens that your site ranks
low, because, despite having great content, if you've got links that don't work, dead
pages, outdated material, it may fail to attract the visitors. If your site marks a sharp
fall in its rankings, watch it out.

How URL checkers work?

Some URL checkers only check local links but this will not work completely for a
Library web site, since many of its pages are portal pages that list remote resources,
and most of them are subscription-based.

Some URL checkers gather URLs by spidering - they fetch pages from your own
HTTP server - which is slow and puts a load on the server, while others gather URLs
by reading HTML files in the file system, which, while fast, may be inadequate for
checking dynamically generated pages.

Web Doctor, CyberSpyder, SiteSweeper review the sites and do a kind of site
monitoring. They can identify slow-loading, outdated pages and problems with broken
graphics. CyberSpyder Link Test will check up to 65,536 unique URLs.

Features of a URL checker

1. Speed: Since it needs more time to gather and validate URLs from the wide
extent of network coverage, a URL checker has to be designed so that it contains
a parallel URL checker. This reduces the load on one, as the other URL checker
shares it, and facilitates the speed.
2. Magnitude: Some earlier URL checkers, written in the initial stages of web
development failed to cope up with the increase in the number of files and URLs
beyond the amount of space available in their memory and con sequently
collapsed. But, the present URL checkers carry intensive checks looking for tens
of thousands of files and URLs at a single phase.
3. Economical: Search engines must be able to have low cost performance in
utilizing their capabilities like While checking URLs gathered from many HTML
files, they must ensure that they check a given URL only once, even if it is
referred more than once. There is no need to spend a lot, just, since what you
want to find is the validity of a URL.
 4. Flexibility: These URL checkers work with the help of built-in generators
gathering URLs from different sources, from a variety of HTML parsers and from
a variety of reporters, which determine how bad URLs are reported.

Each Search engine offers you certain commands to search for URLs or pages in their
indexes. The respective commands of some of the major search engines are as follows:

Google

- You can easily find a single page listed in Google using the command
“allinurl” as: allinurl:usaindians.com/loans.html. While searching never prefix your
search with “http://”.

- While searching to locate all the URLs listed in a particular web site, use the
“site:”command along with a word or phrase that is certain to appear on all the pages
as site:usaindians.com Indians. This command fetches almost all the pages from
the site, because they would certainly have the word Indians somewhere in the site.
This command must always be used in combination with a search word or else it fails.

Altavista

- In order to locate a single page in Altavista’s index, you can use the command
“url:”as: url:http://usaindians.com/loans.html.

- In order to locate the entire list of URLs in the site, use “host:” command as:
host:usaindians.com. The results will show a difference when the prefix “www” is
used.

Excite

- To locate a single page using Excite’s index, use the command “url:” as:
url:www.usaindians.com/loans.html. There is no need to include http://.

- To locate the entire list of URLs from a particular site, use the command “site:”
as: site:usaindians.com.

Validating HTTP: URLs

The HTTP Protocol supports a HEAD request and retrieves HTTP headers only.
Earlier versions of the URL checker would fall back to the GET method if the HEAD
method was not recognized, as HEAD was not defined in the earliest versions of the
HTTP protocol. But the current versions do not face these kinds of problems.

Validating FTP: URLs

The File Transfer Protocol is a bit harder to handle than HTTP for the reasons that:

1. It is a connection-oriented protocol, whereas HTTP is connectionless.

 2. While HTTP uses a single bi-directional connection, FTP uses several per
session.
3. FTP requires a lengthy conversation, exchanging username, password, and the
like, whereas HTTP uses a single query and response.
4. Moreover, there is no command in the FTP protocol to simply test the existence
of a file or directory and can not even differentiate a file or directory based on the
URL. The FTP NLST command could not distinguish files from directories, and
the output of the LIST com mand is completely inaccurate and unreliable.

Validating NEWS: URLs

The news: scheme can refer either to a news article, or a news group. The NNTP
protocol has got a STAT command which tests for the existence of an article without
actually fetching the data, and a GROUP command to select a newsgroup, with
appropriate error status if the group doesn't exist.

Both the news: and nntp: schemes use the Network News Transfer Protocol. news:, a
older scheme, has some flaws like, it gets connected to an unspecifie d news server,
and since different news servers provide different sets of newsgroups, a news: URL
that works for one user may not work for another. The nntp: scheme specifies an
NNTP server to connect to.

Validating FILE: URLs

The file: scheme is not perfect since it names a file, but doesn't name the host where
the file exists. Even it does not specify any particular means of or protocol for
accessing the file. It simply assumes that the file is accessible to the browser. Thus,
file: URLs are ineffective for general web publication, but they works well for intranet
publishing, where the intention is to prevent access by those who don't have the
privileges to access the file. This validates the URLs by testing for the presence and
readability of the name file by the URL checker. But, the great concern is that
browsers may not run on the same host that the URL checker runs on, and the user
running the browser may not have the same permissions as the user running the URL
checker.

Validating MAILTO: URLs

It is a useless effort trying to validate a mailto: URL. A mailto: URL specifies an

Internet email address that is accessed via the SMTP protocol. An SMTP server
responds to the VRFY or EXPN commands in order to validate email addresses. But,
the server will either tell you to go away, or blatantly lie about the address. Suppose
we get a positive response from the VRFY command, it may not necessarily be a
valid address. And if you mail to that address, it may be forwarded somewhere else.

5.2.4. Online Promotion

What is online promotion?

Online marketing or promotion helps carry out business on the web with minimum
expenditure. Many sites are offering online marketing options that are mutually
beneficial. It helps them enhance business on the web facilitating a person living in a
particular place to order any item in any other part of the world without actually going
there, and thereby saves time and money. The buyer can now overcome the
desperation that he/she is not able to buy the product.

How search engines augment online marketing?

The success of Search engine has straight away transformed the websites into the
media of Online Promotion or Online Marketing. Most of the sites are able to advertise
their availability, products, and services to their potential visitors through search engines.
Search engines are promoting online trading with their persistent efforts to boost traffic
to these sites. Having high rankings in the listings of major search engines will positively
attract quite a large number of visitors to your site and help you realize more business.
But submitting and optimizing your site for one or two keywords is not just enough. In
order to attract more visitors, you have to constantly review how well your site interacts
with the search engine so that the visitors can find and go for business with your site.

When a visitor is searching for particular information with the help of a search engine, he
becomes aware of a greater variety of sites residing on the web that are listed high in the
search results and there is a chance that a person may throw a glance at some of the
new sites. If a visitor likes a site he/she is likely to visit that site again and thus he/she
can become a great source of advertising. This is very much true when you consider the
following points.

- Nearly 57% of Internet users search the web each day.

- About 80% of Internet users use search engines to find the sites that suits their
requirements.
- 1 in every 28 pages viewed is a result of a query made through search engines.
- Search engines make 55% of online purchases possible.

Budget specification

Getting listed in the top search engine results is one of the least expensive methods of
online trading when compared with other methods of advertising like banner advertising,
title advertising. Your site is 2000% more likely to get visitors from search engines than
in other ways. In order to advertise in other ways you have to pay huge amounts and in
turn the traffic you receive may not be effective. It may be so because as long a s you
pay for advertisement, you are likely to receive traffic and the moment you stop
spending, your position will be taken by some other competitive websites. This means
that you have to spend regularly on the ads, which will be burdensome for budget -
specified sites. So, with a little effort and less spending, you can make your site appear
high in search engine rankings, which certainly promises you many visitors. The
minimum costs you have to spend for this include domain name registration charges,
cost of hosting a site and the cost of submitting to a directory or a search engine. All
these costs are very insignificant when you compare with the benefits you receive.

5.2.5. Adding Search to your site

Since the Web stores volumes of information, the bro wsers have to take a lot of strain to
find just what they want in the absence of a search engine. In order to provide help to
the users and also make their sites popular, it has become common for all sites to have
their own search capabilities. The vast majority of sites are benefited by their search
tools and it is easy to set up them. There a number of services that add search to your
sites quickly and easily. FreeFind, SearchButton, MondoSearch, Atomz, intraSearch,
PicoSearch are popular among them.

Necessity of having Search Engine to a Website

A book contains an index, which is restricted to the time of its publication and you cannot
find information on the latest topic like Anthrax virus in that book written some decades
ago. But Internet is volatile. It is persistently changing with the change of time. Online
search reflects the changes instantly and automatically whenever a site is updated.
When a website is equipped with a search engine, this helps the users of that site to go
for latest search including the website itself, whenever they require, sticking to that
particulars website without at once shifting for another one.

Getting your site indexed

You need not to be worried about the strain and complexity involved in setting up and
maintenance of a search tool. The search Engine need not be on the same server as the
site itself. You can simply employ one of the search services and let it handle the
technical implications like configuration and server maintenance. The site has to be
registered with its name, a password and a URL. If you are having lengthy HTML files
and your server is relatively slow or if you get charged by byte, the server can be made
to send just the meta information about an HTML file.

Search Page

Search pages act as the user interface of the search engine. It can be made minimal
with just a text field and a button and placed in the navigation section of each page.
Advanced features, though advantageous to a smaller section of viewers, are more
accurate and precise in giving the results. They include options for phrases, fields
(marketing, finance), areas (specifying country name, side) and date ranges (like 'last
month', 2000) which ease the search and speed up the results. Searching also depends
on the engines used. Some engines assume that you want those pages that contain all
the keywords mentioned by you, and others that provide pages that have any of the
keywords. This feature will definitely influence the number of matches the search engine
finds for any particular search. Moreover, if there are any special characters on your site
that are not commonly used, it is your responsibility to make sure that your search
engine will be able to find them.

Results page

While searching for pages on the basis of a keyword, there is a chance that search
results do not include your page since those words are missing in your search terms
even though your site is one of the best acclaimed. Be sure to test your engine with
specific data. Some search engines specify the entire URL. If it is too big, take care to
mention only the title of the page that matches the keyword. It is also better to specify
the size of the file, the date last modified and a brief description about your site
depending on the data that will be useful to more users. Check regularly to see that the
search server is still up and available. You must keep your search form and results page
updated to match any site design changes. Keep your search engine up to date with any
content changes by running regular indexes. It depends on how often you change your
data. If you constantly update your site by adding latest information, you may need to
update your indexes frequently. Keep a watch on what kind of data is required by most
of the users by going through the earlier search requests.

Remote Site Search Tools

Some of the remote site search tools are included here. There capabilities and also how
much they cost you are given. Try some of them and reach out to your users with the
best information quickly and efficiently.

a. Atomz: This is a free version and will index up to 500 pages on a weekly basis and its
logo will be added to results page. It’s paid version charges US$500 per year for
indexing up to 250 pages, $1000 per year for indexing up to 500 pages, $2000 per ye ar
for indexing up to 1,000 pages.

b. FreeFind: This is a free version and will index more than 2000 pages.

c. IntraSearch: This is a free version and will index up to 1,000 pages.

d. MondoSearch: This is a paid version and charges $144 per month for indexing up to
1,000 pages, $585 per month for indexing up to 5,000 pages, $990 per month for
indexing up to 10,000 pages.

e. PicoSearch: This is a free version and will index up to 1,500 pages and its logo will
be added to your results. Paid version charges $199 per year for indexing up to 3,000
pages, $399 per year for indexing up to 6,000 pages; price is negotiable for more than
6,000 pages.

f. SearchButton: This is another free version which will index up to 1,000 pages.
Paid version charges $300 per year for indexing up to 1,000 pages, $600 per year for
indexing up to 5,000 pages.

g. SiteMiner: This is a free version. Paid version charges you $29.95 per month, $295
per year for indexing up to 1,000 pages.
 6. Web Search

6.1. Researching Keywords

Targeting keywords is one of the key aspects of optimizing your site. Before planning
your keywords, better do some research on the words in order to attain high rankings
in the results of some of the major search engines. Sometimes, changing certain
keywords or keyword combinations may considerably promote or relegate your
rankings.

The first step is to note down all the possible keywords you have in mind. And then go
for some products that help you check those words against others for high relevan cy
and competition. Some search engines themselves are equipped with certain tools
that check for the popularity of a word.

While choosing keywords, you need to keep in mind some aspects like

- What are the keywords that best suit the content on your p age?
- What keywords are used by your competitors in their sites that possibly outdo
your business?
- What keywords are mostly searched for by your potential visitors.

How to research for the best keywords?

There are some products available in order to find the best keywords to your site and
also help you trace your rankings for each keyword. Since, it is humanly impossible to
visualize the results of every keyword or phrase, these products are handy to try and
take advantage of several combinations of keywor ds and choose the best one for your
site that helps you target the potential traffic. They also specify how many hits a
particular keyword received during a period.

1. Wordtracker – This is a fee-based service that helps you find how your site
ranks for all possible keyword combinations that are probably related to your
business or service or used largely by your potential visitors. Since it is quite
natural that you might have missed the possibility of some keywords or phrases,
this product ensures you that you will never miss any single keywords
combination. You can learn how popular each keyword is and this helps you
select one to make to the top 10 in the listings. You can also rate your keywords
against those of your competitors’.

2. Overture - The search engine Overture(GoTo) has got a service called ‘Search
Term Suggestion Tool’which provides you with the ability to look how popular a
search term is based on how much traffic it achieved in the past.

3. Keyword Generator – This ranks the keywords on the basis of number of

times a word has been sought for and provides alternate keywords for a term. It
finds some 20-30 related words that were queried in the past for a single word.
For instance, if we enter the term “baby”, then it lists similar words like “baby
food”, “baby health”, “baby outfits”, “baby care”, “baby feeding”, etc. Since a
 word cannot have same frequency in two different search engines, it makes
sense to evaluate all the possible alternatives. Once you know the words that
work well with each search engine, you can think of the possibility of using
different keywords for different search engines.

4. WebPosition Gold Reporter carries out rank checking mission and simplifies
the task of search engine positioning. If you click on the "Actual Results" link on
the WebPosition Gold Detail Report, you can view the actual number of
matching Web sites reported for that keyword or phrase. If you are considering
two terms or phrases that have same the frequency, and if one returns
10,000matches and anothe r returns 100,000 matches, you need to consider
only the one with the fewer matches because in that case you'll be competing
with fewer Web sites to be placed high in the search results. Once you know
what terms have high frequency and less competition, yo u can target those
words that give your site competitive advantage over other sites. WebPosition’s
"Page Critic" feature analyzes the keyword concentration on your Web pages
and how far they can cope with competition from other sites.

5. Double checking through “Related searches” some of the search engines

offer this feature where you can double check your results from different search
engines because a word cannot have same popularity with all the crawlers.
Sometimes, there will be a lot of variations in the results for the queries made
through different search engines for the different forms of a word. For instance,
some search engines differentiate search terms based on its form – whether
plural or singular form, and also if a word has the first letter capitalized.

6. Web Promotion Companies – There are some web promotion companies that
checks for the quality of your keywords. They carry out a comprehensive
research of your keywords by going through each crawler in order to report the
appropriateness, popularity and frequency of each word. They suggest which
keywords have high relevancy and potentiality of targeting the traffic to your
site.

You can now dream of accomplishing the task of attaining high rankings in most of
the search engines. Never use the same set of keywords for different search engines.
This will enhance your chances of accessibility by most of the visitors.

6.2.1. Search Guide for Users

Internet has revolutionized the way you get information and has improved the
possibilities of accessing latest information in any field like science, computers, space
technology, medicine, career, education, etc. It’s a place where you can find a lot of
information for any given word or phrase. Using search engines will not only help you get
comprehensive information, but also more relevant ones. But, since they offer thousands
of results, without planning proper search strategy, you are making a futile effort
searching for exact pages you need among millions of web pages available.
Comparably, one of the main reasons why search engines fail to get relevant information
is because most of the users are unaware of how to search effectively. So, for effective
search prepare yourself to:
 – Identify the keywords in the page you want and select the most appropri ate word.
– Know what type of search engine has to be used in order to get accurate results.

Identifying and using Keywords

In order to attain best possible results, the searchers must follow a few tips while
selecting keywords. A search string is a word or a combination of words. Web
developers are aware of what keywords visitors tend to use most, and they optimize
their sites for the most possible keywords. So, while selecting a keyword that is used to
find information, make sure that you are using a related term that points you to a better
page.

While searching through search engines, if your search string is a combination of words,
ensure that each word is separated with a space. For instance, you can use “California”,
“programmer” or “software engineer”, “search engine”, etc.

While searching for specific job titles, always place them between the double quotes. For
instance, while you search for opportunities for a specific job like a Systems
Administrator or a Technical Writer, you enter them as “Systems Administrator”or
“Technical Writer”. But make sure that you will not use any other punctuation marks like
commas, dashes, etc. except quotes.

You can use Boolean expressions like “AND, OR, NOT”. You can also use symbols like
“&&, || and !”. Using these means, you are opting to search for any of the keywords or
every keyword in the results page.

Ensure that you get the same results for singular words and plural words like something
the results may vary if you use words – swim, swims and also swimming.

Using the best search engine

There are a great number of search engines at the reach of the users, which vary widely
in size, accuracy and coverage. Search engines always aim at giving precise results to
the users. But the users must see that the y choose the most suitable one depending on
their requirements.

If you are looking for a rare word, go for a search engine that has wide coverage, since it
covers a wide range of the web, and may be able to find out appropriate pages. If you
are searching for a general word, you can use any search engine.

Always remember that larger number of results do not mean accurate results. A search
engine may list thousands of pages, but even a single page may not rank relevant to the
query made by the user.

If you are looking for the latest information about a certain topic, use that search engine
that gives you access to it, because it takes time for some sites to appear on some of
the search engines.

6.2.2 Search Guide for Webmasters

Sometimes you feel that your Web site is lost among billions of pages on the Web when
search engines bring up all possible sites and not your own. If you desire that your Web
site could be noticed in the major search engines and directories, you need to take some
steps to ensure that your pages appear on more search engines. It is not enough if you
simply create a page and put it on the Web. You have to enhance your site’s
appearance and needs so that it overwhelms and throws aside other pages. There are
some crucial tips you must catch hold of to optimize the visibility of your Web pages on
the major search engines.

You must follow Search engine optimization techniques, which will give your pages a
stand among other top ranking sites.

1. Develop Good subject matter

2. Concentrate on Keywords
3. Follow Search Engine Optimization Techniques

1. Develop Good subject matter

The first and the best thing you can do to achieve high search engine ratings is to have
good content. People who visit your site must find it worthy to recommend it to others.
Search engines know that a page has relevant content by counting the number of links
to the page which suggests the reputation and demand for that site. If you don't have
good information, your site loses its users and becomes anonymous.

a. How to achieve Great Content?

- Whatever that you offer must be easily understood by everyone and valuable
information to the readers. Avoid extravagant jargon, unless you're writing something
highly technical that requires jargon to understand. Make sure your writing is
grammatically correct, properly punctuated, and that all words are spelled correctly.

- Do not deviate from your topic. You must aim at an elegant page that provides
adequate information regarding a situation. If your topic involves complex matter that
might run into pages, break it into several shorter pages that are relevant to the main
theme.

- Update your pages regularly with the latest information. If you maintain the regularity
and consistency of the data, the viewers will be interested in visiting your pages. They
suggest it to others.

- Do not include excessive graphics. Most of the search engines read only text and
images are of least importance to them. A page made up of too many graphics with little
text is essentially negligible to a search engine.

- After creating a page, do not relax. Submit it instantly to a search engine.

2. Concentrate on Keywords

Keywords are the most important words on your site. They are Key to Search Engine
Success. They express themselves to the search engines all about your page and what
make them unique and different from others on the web. High Density of a few words
tops the appearance of your page. As a general rule, your keywords should make up
anywhere between 3% to 10% of the text on your page. Make sure they appear in main
headings, section headers. Plan your paragraphs so that the keywords appear
somewhere in the introduction, content and conclusion sentences. These simple
guidelines would get you closer to optimal visibility of your page.

a. How to select better keywords?

- You should better avoid commonly used keywords because you'll be competing with
millions of other pages for a search engine's attention. Make them as specific as
possible. If you must use popular keywords because that's what your page is about,
combine them with other words to make phrases that people might search for. Your
keywords can be two or three word phrases that people might use to search. Also use a
few synonyms of the keyword in your text. The idea is to use keywords that are common
enough so that the "typical" searcher might use them, but unique enough to avoid
millions of pages being returned in a search result. Keywords used by searchers, can
easily be found out which keywords are being submitted to search engines at this very
moment. Use Jeeves to go through them, which shows you 20 or so requests it just
received. You can also have a look at the results generated by the request. For every
ten seconds it refreshes. Metacrawler's Metaspy and Excite's Search Voyeur operate in
much the same way. You must spend some time with them to know the requirements of
the users and in what way you can improve the quality and content of your page.

- Many references can be found for a single keyword. Just try to ex periment with
different combinations of words to find the most useful keywords for your site.

- Search engines ignore the most common words. These are called stop words, because
the engines don't bother to stop to read. They also commonly ignore adjectiv es and
articles, so don't rely on them as critical keywords on your page.

3. Follow Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Make an effort to keep your web site fresh, especially if you want to get repeated
visitors. If a site is static, people will stop visiting it again and again, but if there is always
something new, people will often drop by just to see what's changed. The web allows
you to control how your information is presented. You can definitely gain from it.

You might need to think about doing a complete site redesign every few months. This
not only makes your website look attractive, but also will give you the opportunity to take
advantage of newer technology in a better way. This also helps to improve your site as
time goes on, as you'll invariably learn better techniques. Some of the techniques to
make your page look elegant are:

- Focus on a single theme throughout the site.

- Split your information into logical sections, especially if it is large.
- Make sure your home page is attractive and well laid out.
- Try to use colors, styles and fonts that complement one another.

a. Ensure that you don't minimize the importance of layout and design. The style and
look of a web site is subjective, and everybody will have their own idea of what looks
good. It's important to keep in mind that when you develop a web site, you have to cater
to the widest possible audience, because everybody will not have the same browser you
do, with the same graphics settings, or the same operating system. It migh t look great on
your screen, but might look awful on somebody else screen. Do not assume that all your
users use the same kind of browsers or operating systems.

b. Try to test your pages to see how they look with:

- Some of the widely used browsers

- Different size screens
- Text-only browser (or images turned off)
- Different color resolution

6.3. KEYWORDS

It is a fact that your website is found on the search engines chiefly based on search
terms or keywords used by the visitors. Therefore, it is necessary to know how the
visitors search your site, using their search keywords, so that you can work on your site
according to the visitors’way. So, while optimizing your website, it is essential for you to
list out the word or words, or phrases or keywords that represent your website’s
objective. Besides this, along with your idea of selecting keywords, take some good
ideas of your co-workers, and or even have help from various search engines to know
how your rivals have picked up the keywords for their websites. Here mentioned are
some of the important points that help in selecting compatible keywords to your website.

1) Keywords from the website

Your website itself is the main basis of selecting usable keywords. Go for what concept
your site is aimed at and pick up the relevant keywords from the concept. For instance,
your website is aimed at selling “jeans wear”, you can include keywords such as “boy
jeans, girls jeans, mens jeans, womens jeans, blue jeans, denim jeans, lee jeans, jeans
shirts, casuals, wrangler jeans, etc. You can also include the brand names of the
garments with the registered trademark TM or reserved symbol ® legally in your
webpages. If you sell some company -branded items of attires, include the name(s) of
the company in your keywords, say, “lee jeans”, “Wrangler”, etc., as mentioned above.

If your company or organization is well-known, you can also include its name in the
keywords, otherwise, you can create “About Us” a page that describes about your
company or organization to those who are particularly searching for you.

2) Using Common Words

You can use common words in your keywords, since majority of the searchers search
using common words. But it doesn’t mean that you use “Software or Internet or Web”in
your keywords as they are completely ignored by the search engines themselves.
Consider that even your common words should be worth your appearance in the top
search results or else should be close or proximate to your search terms. Ensure that
the words you are using are strategic, unique and descriptive of the content on your
page.

3) Phrases or Multiple Words

Most of the visitors go for phrases or multiple words for searching, when they fail to get
suitable information using one word. So, consider using 2-3 word phrases, which help
your searchers, find your site. Also, while placing keywords on your page, consider them
placing in the form of phrases so that your page may be listed, when people search
using phrase or multiple words.

If the searchers search for “cotton jeans”, as an example, your page can be listed when
you have chained the two keywords “Cotton” and “Jeans” creating the page with cotton
jeans and “cotton jeans”punctuated together, along with proximate words such as cotton
shirts, cotton trousers, jeans shirts, jeans shorts, cotton casuals, etc. With this, a
searcher may also go for other products you sell.
4) Case-Sensitive Search

When a searcher searches Jeans using Case-Sensitive Search facility, most of the
search engines display pages with an upper case “J” only. If your page doesn’t have
“jeans” with “J” in the uppercase, sometimes, your page may not be displayed.
Conversely, if your page has “Jeans”with uppercase “J”in your keywords, and a search
engine searches using “jeans” with lowercase “j”, then your page may be displayed,
since most of the search engines search the terms by default without bothering the
cases. As such, consider some keywords in uppercase or initial letter in upper case so
that your page may be resulted when searched in Cas e-Sensitive Search. You can add
them in your Meta tags, title of the pages and beginning of the paragraphs. But, the
happy news is that most of the search engines are not case -sensitive.

5) Bad or Miss-spelt words

Sometimes bad or miss-spelt words will be luck for you. A search sometimes miss-pelt a
word. For instance, “children’s dresses” may be miss-spelt or bad spelt as “childrens
dresses, children’s dressess, childrens dressess. So, even with such a usage, the
visitors can locate your page when it has such miss-spelt or bad-spelt words. Plainly,
consider including such miss-spelt terms into one of your pages. Also, most of the
search engines do not have spell checkers.

6) Traffic Analyzer

One best way to pick up keywords is finding what keywords people use to search for
your website. This can be done by Traffic Analyzer that counts the number of people
found your website in different search engines and what keywords they used to search
you. Traffic Analyzer is really useful in ascertaining some keywords that you don’t know.

7) Language and Regional keywords

Some visitors go for a specific search, say “movies”. They find some thousands of
pages displayed covering the movies of various languages and regions worldwide,
where they may not find a web page pa rticular to a language or region. If they want to
search for regional and or vernacular movies, say “Indian Hindi movies”, they will narrow
down to region and or language wise search, where they can have exclusive “Indian
Hindi movies” stuff. This means that your website may be lost and may most probably
remain unknown in the wide search for “movies”. So, while optimizing the specific
website, regional and vernacular significance may be considered by adding appropriate
keywords describing the substance it contains. This will help the website to do well at
least in the regional and language search (Indian Hindi movies) as against the general
search (movies).

8) Rival websites keywords

To know how your rival websites are being top rated in the search engine results, you
can view their “keywords” for which they are placed in top search results. By going
through the websites you can have an idea about the picking up of keywords suitable for
your website. But never copy or use your rival website’s keywords, which is known as
siphoning, which is illegal. Shown below is an example of an apparels selling website,
leejeans.com, and the text highlighted in blue color is the keywords used by the website.

<html>
<head>
<title>::LeeJeans.com:: Find the look that's right for you.</title>
<meta name="keywords" content=" City Elements, Buddy Lee, fit, fits, rivited, h.d.
lee, american jeans, apparel, blue jeans, boys clothes, boys jeans, buddy, buddylee,
carpenter jeans, childrens clothing, clothing, denim, denim clothing, dungarees, flare
jeans, girls clothing, girls jeans, jackets, jean jackets, jeans, juniors clothing, juniors
jeans, khakis, lee, lee apparel company, lee company, lee dungarees, lee jeans, lee
jeans.com, lee pipes, leejeans, leejeans.com, leepipes, leeriveted, low rise jeans, mens
clothing, mens jeans, overall, painter jeans, pants, pipes, pipes jeans, plus size jeans,
riveted, riveted by lee,shirts, shorts, skirts, tops, womens clothing, womens
jeans,www.leejeans.com,twills, twill, casual clothing, casual pants">
<Meta name="description" content="Leejeans.com: exclusive search for
comfortable, durable jeans, casual pants, relaxed apparel and fashionable shorts for
Women, Men, Girls and Boys">

<!--VF Corporation website-->

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript"><!—

9) Using search operators

Your search can be made more exact through the use of operators that establish a
kind of relationship between two words that constitute your search query. Some of the
operators are – And, Or, Not, comma, near, phrase, etc.

Search Operator Description of the operator

<AND> Helps Find pages that contain all the words.
<OR> Helps Find pages that contain either of the words.
Finds pages containing the word that precedes it and leaves out
<NOT>
documents that contain the word that follows it.
Finds pages that contain at least one of the words specified,
, (comma) ranking each of them on the basis of number of pages found for
each word.
Finds pages containing words that are near to the word used in
<NEAR>
spelling or meaning.
 Finds documents or categories containing phrases, words that
<PHRASE>
are near to the words used.
Using this operator you can specify fields like description, word or
<CONTAINS>
phrase.
Selects pages that match the words or phrase in title or meta tags
with the values you specify. web pages that have the same
<MATCHES> values you specify for words or phrase are only selected. If a
partial match is found, a document is not selected and if a word is
partially matched, it is not considered.
Wild card operator ? represents any single character. You can
?
use a ? to specify any letter in its place.
* Wild card operator * represents one or more characters.
Placing a word in single quotation marks enables the searchers
' (single quotes) to find variations of a word. For instance, a query for the word
'play' gives pages with "mail," "played," and "playing."
A query that contains more than one word needs to be put in
double quotes for a better search. For instance, a phrase like
" (double quotes) “software engineer” is different from software, engineer and this
operator helps the search engines distinguish and look out for
exact match.
7. Web Submission

7.1. Submitting to Directories

Unlike search engines, Directories use human editors to compile the site listings in their
directories. Once your site is listed in the directories, the advantage there is that the
spider-based search engines will also spot you and list you in their indexes. You will be
presented to quite a large number of potential visitors in the major Directories like
Yahoo, Open Directory and LookSmart. To get listed in the top listings of the directories,
you have to submit your website in a much better way. Since human beings compile
these directories, there is no need that you optimize your site for certain keywords.
Human editors can read the content and list you on the basis of the quality of your page.

How to submit a website

1. Length of the Title

A Page Title is significant because it suggests something about your page in the best
possible way. Before submitting to a directory, you must do some research regarding
what words are most sought after by the visitors. Don’t make a wild guess because how
well your site ranks in the search engine listing depends to a greater extent on your title.
Ensure that your title is short i.e., about 50-60 characters. But, more likely it should
include your company’s name, some keywords and the best possible description of the
content of your page. If you have some information on your page regarding marriage
celebrations, then title your page as “Make your occasion memorable by
USAIndians.com”

2. Length of the Description

Description of a page summarizes the content of the page in a few words more precisely
and quite specifically. The success of your site much depends on the accuracy of your
description. Prepare about a 20-25-word length description of your site so that it shall
contain at least two or three keywords that you expect to be listed for. It must not appear
as a mere arrangement of your keywords or too general. The maximum size of the
description that appears in the listings depends on the directory utilized.

3. Budget

For doing online business, your budget includes basic start-up costs including Domain
Name Registration charges, fee for Web Hosting and Directory Submission fees. If your
site is a commercial site and if you attempt to submit your site in non-commercial
category, this may get your site rejected. The money you spend for this is wo rthwhile
when you compare it with the returns and the traffic you receive.

Below is a table that contains the information about the submission of a website to
different search directories.
 Open
Directory Yahoo LookSmart
Directory
Name
Length of 100
50-60 characters 55 characters
the Title characters
Length of Though No specification
25 words / 25 - 30
the of the limit, better stay
200 characters words
Description between 25-30 words
Two – Standard and Yahoo Two – Free and Paid
N/a
Categories Express versions
"Suggest a Site" link at
http://www.zeal.com/user
bottom of category page for
"add URL" s/
How Do I standard and
link at top of for Free submit
Submit? http://add.yahoo.com/fast/ad
category page http://submit.looksmart.c
d?+Business
om/ for Paid submit
for Yahoo Express
Maximum
2 per site 1 per URL 1 per URL
Categories
No cost for standard
and Yahoo Express charges $149(Basic submit) or
Submission $299 for commercial $299(Express submit) for
None
Fee? categories; commercial sites
$599 for some adult
categories
Turnaround
8 weeks ($149)
Time (Paid 7 business days n/a
2 Business days ($299)
version)
Turnaround
Time (Free 2-3 weeks 3 weeks About 1 week
version)
AOLSearch,
Google,
Major MSN Search, AltaVista,
None HotBot,
Partners Excite
Lycos,
Netscape

If you want to make sure that your site must appear in the listings and to maximize the
traffic you receive, better go for a paid submission. Most of the sites get listed in these
directories. If a site tends to deceive these directories, then it may be rejected. All these
directories work along with other search engines. If your site is not listed in any one of
the directories, don’t worry because there is a chance that your site may be listed in
some of the results of other sites that these directories power.

7.2. Submitting to Crawlers

Crawler-based search engines have “Spiders”that search the web by following links that
point to your site while compiling their indexes. So, if you have good links pointing your
site, then search engines will easily find and list your site in their results. Before
submitting, adopt some optimization techniques to make sure that your site ranks better
than others in every possible way like design, content, etc. This will produce better
results bringing in a lot of potential traffic to your site. If your site appears in any one of
the directories, there are quite a few chances that your site may appear in some of the
major search engines since they supplement their listings with the results from the
directories.

Search engines usually look for the pages on the Web based on the meta tags and
keywords which describe the content of your page. A user requests the search engine
for a particular page with the help of a keyword or a phrase and in turn the search
engine searches for the specified keywords in a page and if those words are fou nd in
your page, your page will be listed in its results. Some of the major search engines are
Google, Northern Light, AltaVista, etc.

1. Title Length

The title of a page not only suggests the content of the page but also differentiates your
site appropriately from others. Ensure that your title contains at least one or two
keywords that are looked for by most of the visitors to your site. If you do not provide any
title for a page, a search engine lists the URL of your site.

2. Description Length

Prepare a short description so that it aptly summarizes the content on your page. These
search engines usually pick up the description from Meta description tag or from the first
few lines of the content they find on the page. The maximum length of the charac ters
that are actually displayed in the results depends on the search engine used.

Search Title Description

Engine Name Size Size How do I submit
AOL
Search 115 250
(Inktomi)
AltaVista 78 150 http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl
Direct Hit 80 175
Excite 70 180 - 200 http://www.excite.com/info/add_url_form
FAST 150 250 http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php
Google 60 160 http://www.google.com/addurl.html
GoTo
120 250
(Inktomi)
HotBot http://hotbot.lycos.com/addurl.asp
80 - 120* 170 - 250*
(Inktomi)
Lycos
150 200
(FAST)
MSN
110 250
Search
 (Inktomi)
Netscape
Search 60 160
(Google)
Northern Light 80 150 - 200
Yahoo
60 160
(Google)

7.3. Submitting via paid listings

What is a Paid Listing?

If you want to give your website a greater chance to appear in the listings of major
search engines, then opt for submitting via Paid Listings, which assures your site a
greater chance of appearing in the top listings of the major search engines within a
shorter time for the keywords you think you have greater probability. Most of the major
search engines provide this facility. You can have a short-term advertisement or long-
term advertising through GoTo, FindWhat, Google, goclick and some others.
Paid Listings, also called as “pay-per-click search engines”, accept to list your site if you
pay for some of the terms you wish to appear for. Each time someone clicks on your link
provided in the listing, you need to pay certain amount. For example, if you wish to
appear in the top rankings for “search engine” by consenting to pay, say, an amount of
10 cents per click and if others can’t afford to pay more than this, then you will be placed
in number one position. But, if others are willing, then pay more money. Say, 15 cents
per click, then your rank will drop down. In order to regain your position, you will have to
pay more. This ensures you instant appearance in the listings. All these paid listings
appear in separate boxes above or on the sides of the actual listings.
Placement Of Paid Listings

The sites that get submitted via Paid Listings appear immediately below the search
box, under either the "Featured Sites" or "Products and Services", “Sponsored Link”
headings or in boxes above or to the side of the actual listings.
How to submit via Paid Listings?
Overture (GoTo)

GoTo, renamed as Overture, is a popular "pay-per-click search engine." Once you

pay for this, you are sure that your website will appear in the listings in about 2-
4 days. Most people notice Overture's paid listings through other search engines. For
instance, the top listings for "search engine" at Overture would also appear in the
"Sponsored Links" section at the top of AOL Search's results. You can experiment
with paid listings by opening an account by depositing a minimum of $50 and there is
a monthly minimum spending of $20. By choosing certain keywords, you can check
out to enhance traffic. Once your deposit expires, you find that you are no longer seen
in the listings of directories and search engines. This time, you may wish to continue
submitting to them in order to target more traffic from the keywords for which you
haven’t received traffic so far.

You can submit for Overture's paid listings through the URL:
http://www.goto.com/d/about/advertisers/
Altavista, a popular crawler-based search engine is much benefited from overture’s
paid listings. So if your site is enrolled with Go To, there is an added advantage that it
appears in Altavista’s results and also in Yahoo, msn search, etc., because it has
made agreements with these major search engines for distributing its listings.

The results using overture are displayed as:

1. Platinum Search Engine Optimization

For $299 setup and $29.99 a month we guarantee to work with you to do
whatever it takes to keep your Web site in the top 30, in at least three of the
major search engines or your money back!
www.platinumservices.com (Cost to advertiser: $0.40)
2. Pay Per Click Help.com
Your #1 source for pay-per-click search engine information, reviews, tips and
more! Learn how to effectively market and increase site traffic.
www.payperclickhelp.com (Cost to advertiser: $0.28)

FindWhat

FindWhat is another pay-per-click search engine, which works in the same way as
Overture do. Once you pay for it, your site will have an instant placement in the
listings. Though, it doesn’t have the distribution that Overture has, there is no doubt
that even with a smaller distribution base, it still facilitates quality traffic at a lesser
price than with Overture.

If you want to ensure your site for its faster visibility on the listings of Excite, you
submit for paid listings with FindWhat, because FindWhat’s listings are sure to appear
on Excite's search results page.

FindWhat requires an initial deposit of $50. But, there is no monthly minimum

spending. So you may plan to stretch this money out for several months, if you
carefully plan while targeting your terms.

You can submit for FindWhat's paid listings through the URL:
https://secure.findwhat.com/signup/signup.asp

A sample of results we get when we search for a word is presented below. The
advertiser’s fee is listed in the brackets for every site.

Show All Results | Filter Results

1. Obtain Scholarships For College - $27.98 Download
Offering a step-by-step guide to getting a scholarship. The site offers hundreds
of scholarships to choose from for College with scholarships for U.S. and
international students!
http://www.myscholarshipguide.com/ (Advertiser Paid: $0.28)
2. Stafford Loan Resource Center - Apply Online
Information, advice and online application for federal Stafford and alternative
student loan programs and financial aid resources.
 http://www.StaffordLoan.com (Advertiser Paid: $0.26)

Google

Google’s paid listings appear prominently above and on the side of its regular results.
Since it takes some time for a new site to get listed in Google, these paid listings offer
greater advertising opportunities and a fast way to get listed with the service. You can
further continue submitting with this paid listing as in the case of other paid listings.

Google has got a self-service "AdWords" program that requires no initial deposit, but
selecting terms carefully. Unlike the pay-per-click search engines of Overture and
FindWhat, Google has adopted a different paid listings program that works on the
basis of "CPM" or "cost per impression". This requires that you have to pay small
amount for each time your ad appears in the listings, rather than for how often
someone clicks on it.

You can submit for Google's AdWords program through the URL:
https://adwords.google.com/AdWords/Welcome.html

As shown above, your website may be displayed first in the search results (google.com)
when you pay for the paid listing service. But enrolling with a directory or a search
engine or a paid listing can’t ensure your site better if you don’t care to "optimize" your
web site. Because all these may be helpful in publicizing the presence of your site to
your potential visitors, but it is optimization of your site that helps you get more traffic.
You need to make your site appear more useful to your visitors and, as long as you get
more hits, your site will be ranked high. So, start working on search engine optimization
and achieve more traffic to your site.

What is an Advertiser's fee?

The advertiser's fee that is given in brackets for every listing is the amount to be paid by
the client for each click made to their website through any pay per click search engine.
This enables webmasters to publicize and promote their valuable products and services
over the World Wide Web. The site that has got high rank in the listing will have to pay
more and the subsequent sites pay less.
 8. Search Engine Glossary
Altavista – A popular search engine having the bulk database on the web, indexing
more than 140 million pages. It is interesting to know that Altavista had provided the
search facility for Yahoo till 1998. The URL of Altavista is http://www.altavista.com. You
need to submit only the main page of you r site as Altavista spider explores your site and
index an emblematic sample of the pages. Search results show up the paid entries first.

AOL Netfind - A site and is a default search engine for users of the AOL internet service
provider. Its main URL is http://www.netfind.com.

Ask Jeeves - A Meta search engine that allows to ask questions in English. This feature
can also be found at Altavista. http://www.askjeeves.com.

Boolean search - Boolean search allows a user to search for either of the keywords or
all keywords combined or excluding certain words that are specified by the user. This
task can be performed by using operators such as AND, NOT and OR.

Clustering - Filtering to show only one page of each web site in a search engine or
directory’s list of search results. This not only increases number of sites in search
results, but also makes the list of result understandable and more useful to the user.

Dead Link – A link on the web that fails to drive the visitors to a page or site, due to
server down or when the page has been moved to a different location or removed
altogether from the site. Most search engines delete such page from their listings
automatically, but while the use of Internet continues to increase, it would be difficult for
a search engine to check each and every page of index regularly.

Description - A text that is usually displayed along with the title page and URL in the
results listed by a search engine or directory on the basis of a query. This text will be
provided in Description Meta tag, but search engines generate their own description in
case it is not given.

Direct Hit - A system that observes which sites the users select from the search engine
results; counts how often each site in the results is clicked on and also the time that a
visitor spends at a particular site. This helps in improving the quality of a site.

Directory – A server that indexes the sites on the web. Usually, this is a human-
compiled one. Example: Yahoo, Looksmart.

Domain - A sub-set of Internet addresses. Domains are hierarchical, and lower-level

domains often refer to particular websites within a top-level domain. The most
noteworthy part of the address is found at the end. .com, .org, .gov, .edu divisions
suggest the areas of their use and they are typical top-level domains. Several
geographic domains such as .in, .ar, .ca, .fr, .ro, etc., refer to particular countries.

Excite - Known as one of the best search engines indexing about 55 million pages. The
URL is http://www.excite.com. Sites that use frames must have a NOFRAMES section
so as to be listed. In contrast to the past, Excite is now using DESCRIPTION meta tag in
its listings. Excite is armed with audio/video search facility which is a branded
component of RealNetworks’RealPlayer G2 and also it allows to use gateway pages
and hidden text.

False Drop - Some times the web page retrieved from a search engine or directory may
not be relevant to the query used. This could happen if the key words entered are used
in the wrong context to convey a different meaning or used to establish inter-relationship
between the web pages or the web page is an attempt of spamdexing or there is an
error in the database or a bug in its query program.

Frames - An HTML technique that allows the browsers to look two or more individual
HTML documents within a single web browser screen. Subdividing browser windows can
noticeably improve both the appearance and usability of site as frames group
information on the site, and a visitor can find what he or she wants very easily. However,
a web site with frames often causes great problems for search engines leading to
incorrect indexes. As search engines often index only the part of the framed site within
the <NOFRAMES> section, make sure that the <NOFRAMES> section includes relevant
text so as to enable spiders to index. If yours is a framed site, consider providing a
gateway page or adding navigational links within the framed pages.

Gateway pages – Also known as bridge pages, doorway page, entry pages, portals or
portal pages. If you have got many pages on your site and if you think you may not be
able to index all of them with a search engine, then go for Gateway pages that help you
optimize your site for the keywords you think best describe your page. These Gateway
pages are not seen by the users. Gateway page takes up the role of a homepage and
directs the visitors to your site.

Heading - Most of the search engines give more importance to the text found inside
HTML heading sections. It is advisable to place relevant keywords inside headings while
designing web pages.

Hotbot - Powered by Inktomi, it is one of the largest search engines indexing 110 million
pages. New website submissions will take two weeks or even more to appear. The URL
is http://www.hotbot.com

Index - Index, also known as catalog, is a list of document types, which can be searched
for. Index is created by search engine software and often used as a synonym for search
engine. In search engine scenario “indexes”form the plural for Index rather indices.

Inbound Link - A hypertext link to a particular page from elsewhere in order to bring
visitor to that page. These links help in measuring the popularity of the page. Altavista,
Infoseek and Hotbot allow searches for the inbound links.

Infoseek - One of the largest search engines that adds new sites very quickly, normally
within one or two business days. Infoseek is one among the few search engines that
treat singular and plural forms of the word(s) in the same way. The URL is
http://www.infoseek.com.

Inktomi - The database that is used by some of the largest search engines like Hotbot.
Yahoo also uses Inktomi when no matches are found in its own database.
Log File - A file that stores details of all file accesses. This file is maintained on a server
and analyzing this file helps us find out where from the visitors come and which queries
they are using to access a web site. Though a good number of software packages are
available to analyze log files, Net Tracker, provided by Sane Solutions, is good at
analyzing queries. Weblog, a free program is available at http://www.awsd.com

Meta Search - A search of results of several search engines. A request (query) is made
to several search engines or directories and the results are reported from all the search
engines, after removal of duplicates.

Meta Search Engine - A server that submits queries to more than one search engines
and or directories and report the results after summarizing. Ask Jeeves, Dogpile, Infind,
Metacrawler, Metafind and Metasearch are some of the Meta search engines.

Meta tag - A construct used in the HTML header of a web page to provide information,
which is not evident to browsers. KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION are the most
common Meta tags.

Northern Light - First of its kind to ban Meta search engines from its database. It is
powered with a special feature “pay to access” collection of business, health and
consumer publication articles. The URL is http://www.northernlight.com.

Optimization - Making necessary changes to a web page so as to enhance the position

of that page on one or more search engines, as well as help potential visitors to access
it, is said to be Optimization. This may include design/layout changes, new text for the
title-tags, meta-tag, alt-attributes, headings, and changes to the first 200 to 250 words of
the main text. Navigational links should necessarily be provided within the frames,
otherwise frames have to be avoided.

Page Popularity - Assessment of the number and quality of links to a particular web
page (inbound links). Number of search engines especially Infoseek use this number in
positioning process. The number and quality of inbound links is equally important as that
of optimization of page content. The URL for free service to measure page popularity is
http://www.linkpopularity.com.

Referrer - The URL used by a visitor to access a web page. Referrer log file of a server
will indicate this. Incase, a visitor access the page directly from search engine listing, the
query used to find the page will usually be encoded in the referrer URL.

Robot - Browser program, which follows hypertext, links and accesses web pages.

Search engine – Searches the web for the sites, lists them based on a query. Google,
Fast, Excite, Altavista, etc., are some of the Search Engine s.

Siphoning - Technique of stealing another site’s traffic. This may be done by wholesale
copying of web pages and or by using other’s (organizations, companies or web sites)
keywords or keyword phrases.

Sniffer - Infoseek search engine uses this filter program to prevent spamdexing. Multiple
mirror pages, fonts and background spoofs, multiple title tags, keyword stuffing and also
other types of spamdexing are detected by Infoseek.
Spamdexing - Creating a document in order to trick the search engines into giving high
rankings to irrelevant pages. Spamdexing is also known as spamming or spoofing.

Spider - Often used as a synonym for search engine. It is a software that searches
the web by following links to various sites, scans documents and adds them t o the
indexes of some of the major search engines. Each search engine’s spider is given a
name. For instance, ArchitextSpider is name of the Excite search engine's spider.
 CONCLUSION
Search Engines have narrowed down the process of irksome searching of millions of
web pages or websites on the Web. They have been like magic wands with which a
user can get whatever information he wants, within seconds. This evidently shows the
existence of a greater link and association between the search engines and the
websites and how they interact with each other, of which both the users and the
webmasters need to know in order to be simple and able in their respective pursuits.

With minute effort and expenditure on the search engines, a website can be made to
act as a greater source of information to the visitors. Search engine provides publicity
to a site, promotes online-business and enhances the number of visitors to it. How a
search engine ranks your site, when a visitor looks for a site, with some of your
search terms, depends on its procedures. Each search engine adopts certain
techniques while ranking the sites in the order of their relevance to the keyword or
phrase searched for. But, a search engine is not perfect in every way. It has got its
own deficiencies that are necessitated by some sites that are keen to show up in the
high rankings.

That is obviously the way of the search engines; but what the website has to do for
achieving top search results incessantly in the search engines that are working on
their own beset algorithms, is to adopt the faithful way called Optimization. A website
may, however, achieve top search results via paid listings or pay-per-click way, and
perhaps, without being essentially optimized. But, unless the website has compliant
content and “appealing precision”enchanting the visitor to visit again and again, there
is no use even if it remains continuously in the top search results. For sure, the
compliant content is with the website, but the appealing precision i.e., to bring it out in
the required form and getting it in top search results is under the power of
optimization, after which the website will indeed achieve the desired results without
spending much.

During website optimization process, there involves various facets of optimization

ranging from design to submitting the website to the search engines, as described in
detail in this book. These facets help both webmasters and users in their respective
missions. To webmasters, optimization is the fundamental task to achieve t op
rankings on the search engines, as well as to remain good content providers and get
profuse traffic. Users, who are the active-factor in the recognition of the websites,
search for their required information with the help of search engines, and when the y
find their required information on the web pages or websites, they will contentedly
keep trust in those websites or web pages and visit over and over, as well as the
search engines that help them provide with that information. This one trio-process of
the web pages or websites being suitably matched to the asked query, the users
contentedly acknowledging the web pages or websites to be ultimate, and the
recognition the search engines get therefore, is said to be the ideal process of
optimization. Additionally, in this book, the functions of two major search engines,
Google and Yahoo, have been explained in detail so that, while optimizing the
websites, webmasters may take note of them and design the pattern of their
optimization process according to the search engines’function.
Search engines are intended to advertise websites to their potential visitors, who are
looking for them on the web, but, at the same time, they cannot help promote or drive
the discontented visitors to the poorly optimized sites. So, these sites adopt offending
practices like spamming in order to optimize their sites and achieve greater number of
hits. Spamming techniques allow a site to benefit temporarily, but once it is found out,
there is every threat that it loses all its visitors, besides being prohibited by the search
engines. The fact is that a search engine prefers to produce a fewer accurate results
of the perfect sites, rather than displaying inaccurate results.

In this context, it becomes inevitable for webmasters or web designers to design and
optimize their sites in a better way and promote their rankings in the listings of some
of the major search engines. Thus, there is every need to employ every effort to
ensure a greater relevancy and quality of their results. Once a visitor likes your site,
there is no need for advertising, because that automatically introduces more visitors
to your site.

Moreover, search engines are the favorite tools for web marketing or online
promotion. But the web marketing differs from the traditional marketing in many
ways. The first thing is, though it doesn’t offer you anything free, yet it is very cost and
time effective and offers greater coverage. For instance, if you advertise your product
or company in a newspaper or by erecting banners, only a few people will see it. But
when your product or company is listed in the top search results of the search
engines, you will get potential traffic to your site and thereby your business shoots up,
since 90% of the web traffic originates to the website from the search engines
themselves. And, with the shooting up of web marketing, the importance of search
engines is also growing concurrently.

There has been a continuous change in the technology of search engines in the wake
of addition of thousands of new web pages or websites on the Web daily and latest
developments and research in the information technology, which has forced the
website optimizers or webmasters to invent new techniques to outperform others by
adopting a better optimization process and excel other websites.