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Search
engines come in two varieties, human-edited and spider indexed.
The two major human-edited search engines (or directories
as they are properly called) are the Open Directory Project
(dmoz.org) and Yahoo. Search engine optimization is lost on
the human-edited directories. Because humans will write your
title and description for your site when they place it in
their directories, using both objective and subjective methods,
you have no control in the SEO-world over how your website
will rank in these directories.
In both DMOZ
and Yahoo, you can suggest a title and description, but
most often your words will be rewritten by an editor and
placed in their directories according to criteria of which
you will not be privy to knowing. One of the big differences
between DMOZ and Yahoo is that DMOZ is free and Yahoo is
a paid inclusion. With both search directories there is
the possibility of not being included, but as stated before
DMOZ is free and with Yahoo, if you are not included, no
refund will be given.
The only types
of search engine in which you have some control are the
search engines, which use spiders (sometimes called robots)
to read, index and rank your site. The robots (and this
is plural because some search engines like Google have several)
are basically software applications that travel the Internet
by following links and finding websites to read and add
to their databases. These robots will travel to your website
if you submit your site directly to them (hand-submit) or
indirectly submit (through another software submission service
or application) or fail to submit (they will follow incoming
links to your sites also).
Once the robot
finds your site and indexes it, it will move along to other
sites from your outbound links. When you site is indexed,
then another process takes place and this is the process
of determining your ranking for specific keyword or key-phrase
searches performed upon the search engine. All of the major
search engines that use robots to index websites also use
complicated algorithms for determining the page rank of
your site. The search engine algorithm software looks at
the title and description of the website along with keyword
density and prominence to name a few to see which keyword
or phrase your site is optimized for (if any). Certain weight
is given for each of these components and the page is ranked
accordingly.
The advantages
of the spider-driven search engines over the directories
are that first, search engine robots will continue to index
your site on a regular basis whereas the directories basically
will stick with the same title and description for the life
of the website. Second, a webmaster or SEO professional
has control over the optimization process in relation to
the search engines, whereas in the directories, optimization
is mostly irrelevant. Third, the volume (and popularity)
of people using the search engines far outweighs the volume
using the search directories. This means that yes, the major
search directories are important places to submit your website
to, but the major search engines are an absolute necessity.
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