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The Business
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| What are the most important search engines, and why do we care? |
Susan O'Neil |
T here are many elements necessary for a
successful web site, with different elements required for different kinds of sites, but
there is one necessary ingredient for success for all web sites, and that is traffic.
After all, if no one ever visits your site, it doesn't matter how great it is.
What is driving traffic to web sites today? Most of it comes from the search engines.
According to the GUV Tenth Annual Survey, 84.8% of Internet users find out about WWW pages
through the search engines, with 54% looking to the directories for guidance .
Search Engine or Directory?
there is one important difference - the engines rely
on databases created by spiders, or crawlers
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What's the difference between search engines and directories? Most of the time, we lump
both approaches to search technology together and call them search engines. However, there
is one important difference - the engines rely on databases created by spiders, or
crawlers -- software that has been programmed to "crawl" all over the Web,
indexing the content of web sites. Directories, on the other hand, are built by human
editors who either surf the Web looking for worthy sites in particular categories or
review sites submitted to them by other humans.
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Size of Databases
When you look at the size of their databases, the search engines have it all over the
directories: look at Alta Vista's database, for example, in relation to the directory
Yahoo!'s index of between 1 and 2 million, too measly to even make this chart!
The size of a database matters to you if you are a researcher, for example, because you'll
want access to the widest variety of information, but, if you are a web marketer, what
should interest you most is the popularity of the various search services.
Popularity
When it comes to measurements of popularity, there is one hands-down winner among the
search engines and directories - Yahoo!. According to StatMarket.com, by the end of 1999,
Yahoo! was sending 56% of search engine traffic to sites within its index. This kind of
marketing power is almost beyond imagination. If a web site is listed within the most
appropriate category or categories (Yahoo! generally will allow only two categories per
domain), and if it is listed with a strong keyword-studded title and description, it can
draw hundreds, if not thousands, of hits daily. Here's how it breaks out:
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It is the single most important marketing activity
you will perform for your web site
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| Yahoo! |
56% |
| Alta Vista |
11.18% |
| Excite |
9.66 |
| GO |
8% |
| Lycos |
5% |
| GoTo |
2.76% |
| WebCrawler |
2.15% |
| Snap |
1.58% |
| MSN |
1.25% |
| AskJeeves |
.82% |
| According to StatMarket |
Determining if you're in a Yahoo! Category
It's pretty easy to see if you have been accepted into a Yahoo! category. Go to www.yahoo.com and type your complete URL
into the search box, i.e., mydomain.com. If Yahoo! returns a page that has your site under
the heading "Yahoo! Site Matches," along with a listing of the categories in
which your site is listed, then you are in the directory. However, if your site turns up
under the heading "Web Pages," then you have a presence only in the underlying
search database provided by Inktomi. Many people mistake this for full Yahoo! Exposure,
but this is not the case. It is, instead, an opportunity to correct your omission by
submitting to the Yahoo! directory.
Submitting to Yahoo!
It is the single most important marketing activity
you will perform for your web site
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Approach this submission very carefully. It is the single most important marketing
activity you will perform for your web site. Read everything Yahoo! tells you on its "Suggest A Site" page
, read the great, free articles at Search Engine Watch, and consider getting some professional advice, as
well.
Of course, once the traffic arrives at your web site, the rest is up to you! The search
engines and directories will give you a terrific audience, but it's up to you -- your
content, products, services, navigability, and a professional, trustworthy appearance --
to make the sale.
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Comments? Feedback?
Click here to share your opinion!
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Susan O'Neil is the president of @Web Site Publicity, Inc. and the
author of a book on search engine positioning due this fall from Adams Publishing.
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