Search Engines and Directories

It is important that we understand the difference between Search Engines and Directories.

It is the dream of every internet entrepreneur to have lots of traffic to his or her website. After all, without a steady stream of visitors to your website, how will you earn your online fortune?

The first place you should go when you need a quick traffic feed is the search engines. A top ranking in one of the major engines is the most effective way to increase the traffic to your website.

Albeit, you should however know that statistics show that most surfers never search beyond top 30 results they receive. In fact more than 40% of web surfers will stop reading after the top 10 results! With that in mind, your goal should be to get top ranking positions in search engines for the terms most frequently searched by your target audience.

Getting top ranking in the search engines, however, is not as easy as it sounds. You need to learn the “right” techniques if you want to ensure that your site is well ranked. You need to take advantage of the search engines and build your traffic base.

But first, you need to understand the different types of search technologies being used by your audience and how you can use them to your advantage.

So, what is a search engine? Basically, search engines are programs that use “spiders”; also referred to as crawlers, robots and bots, to crawl the web and automatically index your website based on algorithms (mathematical formulas). Sounds confusing?

Well, for now, here’s what you need to know. The first thing you need to understand about search engines is that in order to get listed in the search engines, you need to submit your website to them. This is to ensure that the spiders find your site and index it.

The second thing you need to understand is that search engines algorithms are constantly changing. What works this week may not work a month from now or even two weeks from now. As a result, submitting your website to the search engines and then forgetting about it is risky. Your listing needs to be optimized and then maintained if you want to generate the traffic that a top spot can bring.

Search engines are not the ultimate answer to dreams of internet success for most online business, but they are definitely a good start. Search engines continue to be a great source of cheap and often free traffic for website owners who are willing to learn the rules required to snag a top ranking spot.

If your website ranks under the keywords most frequently searched by your potential customers, search engines can also be a great source of highly targeted traffic for your website. This is traffic that you can easily convert into subscribers and sales provided your opt-in and sales process is doing its job.

A directory on the other hand, is a compilation of websites that is created and maintained by human editors rather than electronic spiders or robots. The editors review submitted sites and then rank them based on specific criteria.

One of the best examples of a directory is Yahoo, where reviewers organize websites by major topics and sub-topics. Another well known directory is the Open Directory Project (www.dwoz.org) which prides itself on being entirely free, run by volunteer editors who work to provide useful results to searches.