Assignment 1 - SEO - Where to Start
Yahoo! and AskJeeves and Google, oh my!
So you’ve spent, what seems like a million hours, designing a Website. It utilizes every new technology on the market and now you’re the king of the world. Wrong! Without proper evaluation of your Website’s “searchability”, that is, whether it is optimized to best suit search directories and/or search engines, your beautiful masterpiece of a website will not go far into the vast regions of the Internet (echooo, echoo, echo). That may be ok for those of you who simply want your own Website to show your friends at school, but if you’re a serious e-business owner or web marketer, search engine optimization can mean millions of dollars in return on investment. Also, for all you web design students out there, it is a good idea to make sure you know how to best market yourself, a way to make yourself famous amongst the web design community. But wait a minute, earlier I mentioned that your site should be “optimized to best suit search directories and/or search engines .” What the heck was I talking about? Where you wondering the difference between the two, or even better, what they are? That my friend will be what starts this great journey into the world of Search Engine Optimization! But before we begin, I’d like to save myself a little typing and preface by stating that from now on, I will refer to “Search Engine Optimization” as “SEO”. Ok, now were ready.
Search Engines vs. Directories
Search Directories
Search engine directories organize websites into categories so that people can easily find them. They are similar to the Yellow Pages. Search directories offer centralized information for the search engines, so users can browse through any website category based on keyword queries. Seems simple enough. Well, simple is good, but as the Internet expands and information needs to rapidly change, the static "yellow page books" will never be able to meet the quick demands of Internet users. While directories are vital, because of their contribution to search engines, they are slowly transitioning from front end GUIs to backend engines. Back in the day, when the Internet was in it’s pre-teen years, Yahoo! introduced their web directory. The directory was great. It made finding things very easy. You could just go to www.dir.yahoo.com and search a website by category, but it took longer to find what you were looking for. Luckily, advancements in technology brought the advent of Search Engines and users no longer had to sift through millions of website links.
Search Engines
Directories are handy, but what if the archived website links are outdated and you need a way for everyone reading them, to know. That would be very tedious considering all of the online directories are populated by a room of research monkeys, I mean people, who carefully sort out information and categorize it. But enough about Directories, lets move on to the engines. Engine sounds cool, doesn’t it? Search engines, a.ka. search indexes, are really just giant search features that index all of the content that is stored on the Internet.
Over the years, companies like Google and Yahoo! have come up with a way to search and store large amounts of information. The Mad Scientists at Google spent a gazillion hours developing spiders, robots or just plain bots or is it robotic spider bots? Regardless, these mysterious programs find web pages, store their information and then spin a web of information. Wait a darn minute. “What information are they getting? “ What information you ask? Just all the textual data, imagery, audio and video content that is being communicated over the Internet, all wrapped up into a database with a pretty little bow on it. It is a bit scary that companies are able to micromanage what we post on the Internet for all to see, but that is just how things are and in order to spread the word, we have to play by the rules. Whether we want to admit it or not, we need search engine companies to continue to develop ways to better index and search content. We must make friends with and learn from the search engine companies, in order to discover what is needed to rank number one. So without further ado, let me introduce you to the search engine sites.
Before you continue!Make sure you fully understand the two terms below. As we continue, I will be referring to them both when discussing search engine companies.
A search site is a web site with allows a user to search through an index and/or directory of Web sites.
A search system is an organization of hardware, software and manpower(or woman power) that join as one to categorize Web sites and build the indexes or directories searched through at a search site.
Search Sites
There are literally thousands of Websites, which help Internet users search for web content, but the number of web users who use search engines has significantly dropped from 80% to just under 50%. More users are able to find their way to a Web site via the address bar, and the need for search engines is decreasing as people become more comfortable with Internet technology. However, as of 2004 the number of search engine users has remained at 50% of all users, which is just as much as people not using them. I find it interesting that out of the thousands of search sites available, there are really only four that are important to know. Which four you ask? I will get there, just be patient. According to the 2003 Nielsen/NetRatings study, the top twelve most popular search sites on the Internet are as follows.
* Study based on # of hours users visited the search sites.
Google.com 18,700,000 hours
AOL.com 15,500,500 hours
Yahoo.com 7,100,000 hours
MSN.com 5,400,000 hours
AskJeeves.com 2,300,000 hours
InfoSpace.com 1,100,000 hours
AltaVista.com 800,000 hours
Overture.com 800,000 hours
Netscape.com 700,000 hours
Earthlink.com 400,000 hours
LookSmart.com 200,000 hours
Lycos.com 200,000 hours
As you can see, these are the big guys. The popular sites who will steal your lunch money if you’re not careful. They are searched more than any other search sites on the Internet. Why then should we exclude the remaining eight search sites after compressing down to four? After all, AskJeeves is in fifth place and I know many people who use it. The answer is simple. Because many of the search sites feed off of one another, or one site may be owned by another. That’s right, even America Online, the Internet powerhouse gets its search results from Google. We can quickly start to eliminate many of even the most popular search sites by analyzing how and for whom they work.
Search Site Elimination List
Search Site Conclusion
See, that wasn't so bad. We are finally starting to break things down a little and make the enigma that is the Search Engine Company, become clear (hopefully). What the above chart concludes is that you can spend numerous hours submitting to every last search site on the Internet, but you are wasting your time. Focusing on the top four search engine sites, Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AskJeeves, is what you need to do. With Google feeding three quarters of the worlds search results to America Online, Earthlink, Netscape and many others, and AskJeeves providing results for many of the smaller search sites, you can see how smaller search sites operate. Some smaller sites even manage to charge fees to users who submit to them, which in the end are only getting fed to the "big boys" anyways. Understanding the search site system, will save money and time in the long run and will keep you coming out on top.
Search Directories
We now have our four search sites narrowed down. While these search sites are important to understand, let us not forget about the search directories mentioned at the beginning of this posting. The most widely used directory is The Open Directory Project, which feeds information to Google, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Netscape, Earthlink, Lycos, and almost 400 other sites. Zeal, another directory of importance, feeds LookSmart, but only for noncommercial sites. However LookSmart also gets search results from Yahoo!, so Zeal isn't nearly as important as The Open Directory Project, but is worth adding to our list.
Our Finalized List?
Now that we have added The Open Directory Project and Zeal to our list, it is no longer a list of Search Sites. It is now a combiniation of both Search Sites and Search Directories, so lets call our new list, our searchsystems list. So here is the finalized search systems list, just to recap.
Summary
A finalized list is the fist task completed. Once you have pinpointed which search sites and systems to work with, it is now time to perform a thorough analysis of your web site. Doing so is vital to the success of search results. “What, go back and re-do my masterpiece?” It really isn’t that bad, there usually isn’t that much that needs to be changed. It will be worth it in the end. Plus, once you learn the proper strategies for optimizing your Website, it will come natural as you build your web pages in the future. The next posting, assignment 2, discusses the steps that need to be taken in order to best optimize a web site for search engines, and explains how to get your Web Site into the search systems discussed above. Can’t you just feel the excitement! This is better than an episode of 24.