How Search Engines find your Website

On my last post I talked about the search engine spiders or to give them their correct name special software robots , they are called spiders because they crawl through the World Wide Web often starting with heavily used servers and very popular pages

They index the words found on these pages and follow every link on those pages this in turn leads them into other pages spreading out across the most widely used portions of the Web. This will inevitably bring them to your site , especially if you have some Good links to your site

How long this takes is difficult to say as its dependant on a number of things but as a general rule it takes at least 3 months for a new site to get listed in Google

There are a couple of ways of helping to reduce the time it takes for your site to be listed in the search engines index , one of these is too submit your site manually to some of the popular quality directories such as Dmoz

Another would be to have a few Good quality inbound links , this means a link from another site that has content that is relevant to your site , this means the spider can find your site more quickly

Under no circumstances should you start adding your site to a links directory which is basically pages and pages of links as these are now seen as spamming by the search engines and this will reduce your rankings dramatically

Getting your Web Site Listed with Search Engines

In my last post we discussed which were the most important search engines and it was obvious that Google was No1 but also Yahoo and Msn are also important

At this current time many SEO specialists are looking at the results you now get from a search using Google as they results are no longer as good as they once were and many spammy directory listings are starting to score high on Google making some user including myself start to turn to other search engines

Before we discuss some basic Search Engine Optimisation techniques we will discuss how does a search engine find my site

Most search engines will find your site without you having to do anything in the old days (a few years ago) you would have to had submit your web site address etc to all the search engines individually

You can still submit your url to Google but the submission page is hard to find in fact its almost as if Google does not want you to submit web site address any more , You can only submit your site to Yahoo if you pay a fee and I have never been able to find the submit page for Msn

Even if you do not submit your site to any of the above search engines eventually they will find your site on there own , each search engine has its own spider , this is a piece of software that trails through the internet looking for content

The Important Search Engines

Which search engines are important?

Well thats generally an easy one to answer, Google is the No1 search engine in the world with Yahoo second and MSN in third place, the relevant percentages are listed below

Google 42.7%
Yahoo 28%
Msn 13.2%
Aol 7.6%
Ask 5.9%
Others 2.6%

Source comscore March 2006

As you can see a large percentage of the market is taken up by the big 3 and so trying to improve you search engine optimization for the big 3 will bring in more surfers and as Google has the largest share then it pays to work on your Google rankings

The trend from March 2005 to March 2006 has been that Google has increased its share of the search market by taking market share from all the other search engine with the exception of Ask which has had a small growth

SEO and Web Site Design Considerations

Welcome to Affordable Webdesigns search engine optimizations and cost effective web site design blog

 

We are hoping to bring you regular tip and tricks that are simple to implement and to give you and idea of the successful search engine techniques that we use on our client sites

 

For those of you new to SEO most experienced web site designer will have a good basic knowledge of how to optimize your site in the initial building process and will work with on this

 

Sometimes this can effect the overall look of the site and often a client will want a fancy flash introduction page but your web developer will advise you against this for SEO reasons , as the paying client you will want you site to look visually exciting and ignore your web designers advice after all I am paying the bill

 

Well you are correct but any web developer worth his fee will tell you that although the flash intro looks great and he will charge lots of money for developing it search engines cannot spider through flash and the page would have a greatly improved chance of scoring higher in the search engine rankings if it had lots of relevant content on it

 

This means content will often score over stunning eye catching designs unless you are not concerned over surfers finding your site from Google, Yahoo and Msn search engines