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Search engines come in two varieties,
human-edited and spider indexed. The two major human-edited
search engines (or directories as they are properly called)
are the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org) and Yahoo. Search
engine optimization is lost on the human-edited directories.
Because humans will write your title and description for your
site when they place it in their directories, using both objective
and subjective methods, you have no control in the SEO-world
over how your website will rank in these directories.
In both DMOZ and Yahoo, you can suggest a title and description,
but most often your words will be rewritten by an editor and
placed in their directories according to criteria of which
you will not be privy to knowing. One of the big differences
between DMOZ and Yahoo is that DMOZ is free and Yahoo is a
paid inclusion. With both search directories there is the
possibility of not being included, but as stated before DMOZ
is free and with Yahoo, if you are not included, no refund
will be given.
The only types of search engine in which you have some control
are the search engines, which use spiders (sometimes called
robots) to read, index and rank your site. The robots (and
this is plural because some search engines like Google have
several) are basically software applications that travel the
Internet by following links and finding websites to read and
add to their databases. These robots will travel to your website
if you submit your site directly to them (hand-submit) or
indirectly submit (through another software submission service
or application) or fail to submit (they will follow incoming
links to your sites also).
Once the robot finds your site and indexes it, it will move
along to other sites from your outbound links. When you site
is indexed, then another process takes place and this is the
process of determining your ranking for specific keyword or
key-phrase searches performed upon the search engine. All
of the major search engines that use robots to index websites
also use complicated algorithms for determining the page rank
of your site. The search engine algorithm software looks at
the title and description of the website along with keyword
density and prominence to name a few to see which keyword
or phrase your site is optimized for (if any). Certain weight
is given for each of these components and the page is ranked
accordingly.
The advantages of the spider-driven search engines over the
directories are that first, search engine robots will continue
to index your site on a regular basis whereas the directories
basically will stick with the same title and description for
the life of the website. Second, a webmaster or SEO professional
has control over the optimization process in relation to the
search engines, whereas in the directories, optimization is
mostly irrelevant. Third, the volume (and popularity) of people
using the search engines far outweighs the volume using the
search directories. This means that yes, the major search
directories are important places to submit your website to,
but the major search engines are an absolute necessity.
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