How Search Engines Rank your Site When you go to an engine and plug in a keyword, subject, or title that search engines parses millions of documents and almost instantaneously puts those pages in an "order of relevancy." While search engines are very quick, they are not known to be 100% accurate in their retrievals. Engines and directories often times bring irrelevant pages into the results, meaning it may take a while longer and more investigation to find what you're looking for. Overall, search engines do a tremendous job in pulling up relevant information, and getting your site listed in the top of these engines can mean tremendous results for your site. Search engines don't have the ability to ask questions, so they rely on what you've entered for your search. While this may be changing with the likes of intelligent agents, don't expect the same kind of customer service you might find from your local librarian. There are a number of ways that search engines pull up your pages. The first thing almost all engines look at is the Title of a site. If the keyword is found in the title, it's considered to be more relevant and will pull up more quickly than a site without the keyword in the title. Search engines will check to see if the keywords you've entered appear in the top of the web page, like in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. Engines will assume that if the topic is important, it will be mentioned within the first part of your site. Frequency will also factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine will determine how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than a page with less frequency.. Note: some search engines index more web pages than others. This means that no two engines will bring up the same pages. Each has their own style of pulling up information, resulting in different information being considered more relevant. Some search engines also give web pages a bonus for various reasons. For example, WebCrawler uses link popularity as part of its ranking method. It can tell which pages in its index have lots of links pointing at them. These pages are given a slight bonus during ranking, with the reasoning being if a page has a lot of links to it, it's probably a very popular page. Some combination type engines, those containing directories, may give a bonuse to sites they've reviewed. The reason being if the site was good enough to earn a review, chances are it's more relevant than an unreviewed site. Yahoo! Yahoo is very selective and will not index anyone who submits to them. Uniqueness of a site and how it falls into their directory structure are the key points looked at when indexing web pages. Yahoo is not a search engine, they are a search directory. The most important thing to remember when listing your web site with Yahoo is that the relevancy of the site is based on the Title and Comments that you provide. You will want to use keywords that would be used to find your site, in both the Comments and the Title of your site. Excite Excite does not read Meta tags, but they do look at the words in the Title of your document, so be sure your page uses the most relevant keywords that describe your site. Excite can take as long as 4 weeks to index your site, so check back often. Alta Vista Alta Vista is one of the more difficult engines to get listed in the top with. While they do read Meta Tags, you will want to remember that Alta Vista uses a case sensitive algorithm. Meaning, that typing in Promotion will give you a different result from PROMOTION or promotion. Hotbot HotBot utilizes Meta tags within your HTML code to their fullest extent. HotBot will score the words higher in their relevancy rating, so use unique spellings or charachteristics when describing your site. HotBot also looks at descriptive words in your title and Meta description tags, so use them carefully. As with other search engines be sure that the words you use in your Meta keyword tags are words that someone would type in to find your web site. Infoseek Infoseek does utilize virtually all types of Meta tags, and gettting your site indexed in Infoseek is easy. The results of your submission can usually be seen instantly, giving you a good idea of where your site will be listed. As with all of the search engines, be sure that the words you use in your Meta Tags are what someone would type in to find your web site. Lycos Lycos places more weight in the full text of your document, but does look at your Meta Tags. Definitely use Meta keywords, but make sure you repeat those words again at the start of your document. Note: One way to guarantee that your site will not get indexed in Lycos is to utilize punctuation. Be sure to limit or change your punctuation before submitting to this engine. Webcrawler Webcrawler adds new submissions to their database every 2 to 3 weeks. If your site is not showing up in the first 200 it may be because your page has not yet been added to their database. Webcrawler does not take advantage of Meta tags, it utilizes keywords that someone would type in to find your site. How Engines Rank your web pages If you would like to evaluate this exciting new software package, click here to begin the download process. Information | Download | Specials | Purchase | Site Promotion 101| Customer Service | Other Tools