Search Engines
The search engine landscape is changing very quickly and staying up-to-date with the goings-on is a full-time occupation.
At the moment there are three big players in the search game - Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! - but that could change in a heartbeat. Social media such as Facebook and Twitter are having an immense impact on search, and are enabling a shift in power and market share among the major search competitors.
Nonetheless, there are a number of tools that can help the business owner come to grips with the vast amount of information, opinion, and competition.
Keyword Analysis
Google provides free access to a Keyword Analysis Tool that provides statistics based on recent searches in Google. The tool is intended for Google's AdWord customers, but is very useful in determining which keywords a business should focus on in optimizing their website.
There are other keyword analysis tools available, some commercial, some free to use. However, because Google's market share of search is so high, the analysis of its results seems more than adequate to get started with assessing which keywords you want to focus on for your business.
Search Engine Submission
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! are always on the lookout for new websites, so in theory there is no need to submit your website to them for indexing. But why wait? There really isn't anything to be gained by their "natural" discovery of your website, so you might as well submit it to the major search engines. This page, http://freewebsubmission.com/ provides a list of search engines with links to the "submit" page of each. Submitting, of course, is no guarantee that a website will be included in a search engine's index.
Search Engine Indexes
What is a search engine index?
When a search engine finds your website, it "reads" all of the information. A search engine's proprietary algorithm is then applied to that information and determines how relevant the page is to specific search terms. The internet location of the page and the proprietary information about its relevancy is stored in an index for quick retrieval.
When someone searches for a specific search term, the search engine uses the search term to find the most relevant web pages that are in the index. In theory, the pages are listed in the search results in decreasing order of relevancy to the search terms.
What this means in practical terms is that your website will not turn up in a search unless it is first "read" and put into the search engine's index.
How can you tell if your website has been indexed by Google? In the search bar type in the following, subsituting your domain name for "mysite.com":
site:www.mysite.com
This will return the specific pages of mysite.com that are in the Google index.
Other Resources
There are a variety of other web-based resources that can help you make sense of the search engine landscape. There are a number of newsletters that provide good information about search and the latest trends and events. They are dense with advertising, but they also contain a lot of useful information:
There are useful search engine optimization forums associated with these newsletters, as well. |
