Search Engines - An Introduction

Use search engines to boost your business on the Internet
By M. Worcester Major search engines are the way most people access the Internet. Google is the biggest but not the only search engine on the Internet. Learn how the search engines work so you and your business profit from the Internet.
 

Search engines work by completing the following steps:

1. Web crawling, or searching the Internet in an organized way, to find new sites and pages or updated content on existing pages;

2. Indexing, or storing the data collected by the web crawling, so the search engines have an organized list of web content by topic;

3. And searching, or matching the search term a person enters to the topic index it has collected, to come up with a customized list of search results.

Find a comprehensive list of search engines for searching or advertising

The top Internet search engines have the most visitors every day. Consider advertising on specialized (also known as "vertical") search engines relating to your industry. Search for the keywords related to your own business website to see which websites place highest.
Try: Find a list of top search engines broken down by category at Pandia by P&S Koch, where they also have free newsletters about Internet searching and search engines. Read short reviews of all the top search engines from Incisive Interactive Marketing LLC and find search engine submission tips and other information about Internet searching. Choose from a categorized list of Internet search engines at Cyndi's List by Cyndi Howells.

Discover the search engine ranking of your website and how to improve it

Find detailed reports about your search engine rankings as well as "big picture" trends at web analytic sites. Assess your search engine placement and learn what you can do to improve it.
Try: Learn how people find your website and how they navigate through it with a free membership to Google Analytics from Google. Compare the site stats for three websites side-by-side at Compete, Inc., where they list the top search terms driving traffic to each site.

Advertise your job openings on career search engines

Job search engines fall into the category of vertical search engines, which means they search in a specific narrow range of web content. Look for sites that allow employers to advertise their jobs, rather than sites that are just aggregators of various jobs advertised elsewhere.
Try: Post your job opening quickly on Monster, where it's easy to filter and organize responses. Search through existing resumes or post a job opening at CareerBuilder.com, where they also have helpful articles about hiring, recruiting and human resources in general. Find a long list of Internet job search engines and concise descriptions of each site at Index of The Web.

• Improve your search engine ranking by submitting a sitemap file to sites like Google. This file helps the search engine understand the organization of your site and tells it when you add new content.
• Learn how to optimize your website to place higher by conducting specialized searches on popular search engines and analyzing the top-ranked sites.