Chapter 2: Search Engines

Idea 1: Spider-Based Search Engines

1. Getting the spider to visit your site and index your pages. Usually this is achieved either by "submitting" your URL (Note: most services which offer submission to thousands of "search engines" include both search engines and FFAs in their overall totals - for info on FFAs, see Idea 54: Posting To FFAs), or by placing a link on a site/page that is already in the index.
   • You generally do not need to submit all your pages, spiders will usually find additional pages on your site by following links between your web pages.
   • You generally do not need to re-submit on a regular basis. Most spiders will automatically periodically revisit pages that already in the index, and thus pick up changes to your site without any action by you.
   
   
2. Designing your pages to contain your most important and relevant keywords. This is to ensure that your page will be included in the search results for searches on those keywords.
   
   
3. Designing your pages to contain your most important keywords in the most important places (for example, most spiders will usually pay more attention to a keyword that is used in the title of a page, than one that is hidden away in a tiny font at the bottom of a page). This process (variously known as "search engine positioning", "search engine ranking", "search engine optimization" or "SEO") is to ensure that your pages come up near the top of the search results - which of course makes it far more likely that people will see your site in the results and click on it.
   
   
4. Optimizing things which although not part of your page design ("off-page"), can also affect your search engine ranking, for example:
   • Your "Link Popularity". Link Popularity is a measure of how many sites (and how important those sites are), that link to you (see Idea 16: Exchanging Links).
   • Choosing a domain name which contains your most important keywords (see Idea 12: Keyword Rich Domain Names and Idea 14: Domains For Your Interior Pages).

• 1StopSubmit
  Offers free and paid submissions to search engines.
  
  
• WebPosition Software
  Probably the leading software for creating pages that rank well in search engines. A free trial version is available.
  
  
• Traffic Equalizer
  Software to help you get more traffic from search engines.
  
  
• EasySEO Software
  This software is designed to help you find the right keywords to promote your site, and then "reverse engineer" other pages which have already achieved good results - so you can then similarly optimize your pages for improved ranking.
  
  
• Guide to Obtaining a #1 Ranking in the Search Engines
  A step-by-step guide to optimizing your site for achieving a high search engine ranking.
  
  
• The New Search Engine Secrets Exposed
  Another guide to achieving a high rank in search engine results.
  
  
• SearchEngineRocket.com
  Free information about search engine marketing.
  
  
• SearchEngineWatch
  Latest news and tips from the search engine marketing world.
  
  
• Talk SEO
  Discussion board focused on search engine marketing. For additional forums, some of which cover search engine marketing, please see Appendix B.
  
  
• SEO Toolkit
  The Trellian SEO Toolkit is a Search Engine Optimization application that features all the Search Engine Optimization tools you will ever need to manage your web site and reach the top of the search engines!