Ah, search engines. Seen as portals to the internet at large, there are a lot more of these handy gateways than most people can even cream of. This goes far beyond Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Beyond even up-and-coming services like DuckDuckGo or lingering services like Ask.com. There are literally hundreds of search engines out there…
Submitting to Search Engines
It might not always be required, but it’s definitely a good idea.
Major search engines like Google have bots or ‘spiders’ that crawl the web, indexing what they find. Google particularly prefers to find content this way because it feels this method of discovery is more natural. The downside is that a hands-off approach (letting Google find your site(s) on it own) can take up to or beyond a month, and then only linked pages will be indexed. Unless your sitemap is linked to from your home page, Google won’t even know to find it when it is crawling and indexing the rest of your website’s pages.
Did you know that there are about 100 search engines that are worth the extra effort to submit to? It’s true! You might not have thought that there were so many, but even if it has a smaller audience, a niche search engine still has that dedicated following and specialty markets like these can be gold mines if properly handled. While search engines are free to submit to, the time it takes to submit to them is not. There are services that offer to submit your site to X number of search engines for a small fee; this might be something worth looking into if you would like to get things moving along quickly. Otherwise just pick out a few each day and submit to them while you enjoy your morning cup of coffee.
If you make any major changes to your site (content, structure, etc) then it is never a bad idea to submit your site all over again. This will ensure that it gets crawled and indexed in its new format and that this new format is what is called upon each time your site appears in the SERPs.
Click on this graphic for a larger version — See the original post by Search Engine Journal here
Search Engines Have Limits
They are not people. They do not comprehend things in the same way that people do.
Instead, search engines can only interpret the information that they can gather.
We can make things easier for them (and better for us in the bargain) by making sure our websites have clean, well-written code, and that we don’t skimp on the text-based content. Even if a website is mostly graphics or other media content there are still alt and description tags that can be used to describe the content to search engines. In general, most search engines cannot “read” images, videos, or audio clips. Google does a very good job of indexing and working with these types of media providing the author has named, tagged, and described them well enough that Google knows what to do from there.
Search is Big. Really Big.
Search engines are becoming more closely integrated with our lives every day; things that may have seemed completely fanciful five years ago are now posed to become a reality in the near future. It is not a far stretch to see users able to search the web from almost anywhere including their cars…and all without a computer or mobile device!
Because of this and other ongoing developments in search technologies we as internet marketers and online business owners cannot afford to be unaware of anything we could possibly use to help our websites be more visible and easily searched by any of the dozens of major and minor search engines in use today.
Video: TOP 10 Search Engines (Updated 2012)
A short slideshow style video listing 10 of the most popular search engines in use today based on a few different factors. The creator of the video goes into detail about how they arrived at these figures in the description area of the video on YouTube.
Comments:
What is one thing you know now that you wish you had known about search engines when you started your business?
