Internet Search Engines Guide

WHAT THEY ARE : Websites that usually crawl the internet looking for your site(s) and making this information searchable to their visitors .

In most cases you will want to be included in the search engines as it means people use a particular search engine , and searching for something that your site offers might end up visiting your site. The largest search engine is Google (this is the first one we always submit to) which accounts for atleast 80% of our traffic , others that you ought to be in are Yahoo MSN and Ask , there are 1000s of others mostly insignificant and unlikely to draw any traffic.

After creating a site you can notify the search engine that your site exists eg: Google Submit

In most cases to get good free section rankings you need high link popularity , so you will need to get other site webmasters to link to your site (or if you have a great site some people will link to you anyway). A link to your site acts like a kind of 'vote' in favour of your site , the more votes the more worthy your site is likely to be considered of a high ranking for your choice of keywords . Your site needs to be search engine friendly ie: contain Metatags and good content.

You can pay to get good rankings in the paid section - eg: Google Adwords allow you to bid for no1 , if you are not interested in creating search engine friendly pages you might want to go this route (or do a combination of free and paid) . The advantage of 100% paid is you can create more stylish pages without worrying about your rankings , and you are guaranteed to get a placing and visitors coming to your site , the downside is it can be very expensive - unless you closely monitor the bid price verses the selling profit of your goods or service you could end up making a loss. The good news is many of the search engines offering PPC (pay per click) and CPM (pay per 1000 impressions) offer free toring this .

I tried PPC on Google / Overture (yahoo) and Miva and found google was the only one that worked for my sites , my way was to create lots of keywords at the minimum bid price . Obviously at this rate the ranking was no 100+ nowhere near the top for popluar keywrods but for some niche key phrases (ie instead of "loan" choose "laon" or "i am looking for a loan") could get the occasional visitor to my site with very good profit potential.

Coming soon : Affiliate Programs (allowing you to set up or adapt an existing site to sell anything you like without stock by joining forces with any of the high street stores) , and Search Engine Partnering

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Good Sites - Here we list a small selection of sites we have found of use , that might be of interest to our visitors :

Google Webmaster Central This gives you the do's and don'ts first hand on creating good websites for this search engine , and also provides links to some useful tools (many of which are free).

Wikipedia Search Engine Everything from history of search engines to how they work , and contains a diverse range of associated topics from page hijacking to spamdexing , things the average reader will probably want to gloss over .

Useful Tools