Lesson 2 - Search Basics - What are search engines.

Important for the lesson.

1. Read Chapter 2 in the Fast Start Book.
2. What are search engines and how do they work.
3. What is a spider and what is crawler.
4. Should know what the http://www.dmoz.org
5. What is Bing new search engine from Yahoo and MSN. Could compete with Google?
6. Wow I just started working with Bing this Fall, Here How Bing Works.
7. Wiki reading - Search Engines
8. This Video about serach engines is OK
9. How google works

A major focus of this class will be to study information on how to prepare web sites for high ranking on search engines. This lesson will be an introduction to how and why a company would want to have their web site at the top of the search engine and directory lists.

SEO
The description of the process of getting a web site in the top of these list is called SEO. SEO is defined as Search Engine Optimization - the process of preparing a web site to achieve high ranking in Search Engines and Directories.

Why optimize a web site?
SEO is important to marketing on the Internet because 75% of all web site traffic comes from search engines. The word search engine is a little misleading, because web sites such as Open Directory are actually directories while web sites such as Google are search engines. For now let's refer to all web sites that provide search and link functions as search engines. By achieving a high ranking in search engines a company can increase traffic to its site. When a user finds a web site using a search engine it is described as Hits.

What are Search Engines and Directories?
Search engines and directories are web sites that allow a user to enter information requests into an input field and be provided with a list of relevant results. All search engines are powered a little differently, but there are three main types of search engines, sometimes called portals.

1. Crawler-Based Search Engines: This type of search engine, such as Google, use computer programs to "crawl" or "spider" the web and then index the results.

2. Human-Powered Directories - The human powered directories, such as Open Directory project, rely on humans to categorize and create a list of web sites.

3. "Hybrid Search Engines" or Mixed Results - These are search engines that present both crawler-based results and human-powered results. Many users favor one type over the other. For example, Yahoo is more likely to present crawler-based listing, but may present human powered if you click on the directory section.

Here is a link to a chart of all search engines. Please go here and see how they work.http://www.integratedresourcemgmt.com/searchenginenews.html

There a few independent search engines left. Most are either owned by Google or Yahoo. But most search engines share info with each other. Click here to see chart on who shares info. The important point here, once you are ranked in one search engine you will begin to rank in other search engines.

Most of the information in this section is from www.searchenginewatch.com
written by Danny Sullivan

Lesson 2 - Directory Basics - Yes Directories all old.

What are the Directories and how do they work?

Directories are search engines that categorize information. Web sites are placed in certain categories according to the content of the site. These categories are developed by the search engine. For example, Yahoo has several broad categories that narrow down to more and more specific categories.

Here look at the opendirectory project: http://www.dmoz.org/ - a true directory

Yes Yahoo is not really a Directory anymore. This info is from when Yahoo was a directory. A search on Yahoo, for 'Trout Fishing' yields the following path:

Notice that as you receive search results on Yahoo Directory, it will show you the path to the specific category. 'Recreation' is the top level category; 'outdoors' is a subcategory of that, then 'fishing' then 'trout fishing.' Finally you are presented with results and/or more categories. Picture below.

Try searching yourself and notice the path of categories for each topic.

Lesson 2 - Search Engine Basics

What are search engines? How do they work?

1. What is web crawling?
2. General Info
3. How search engines rank pages
4. How google works.

Yes this is a little info overload.

Lesson 2 - Search Engine Basics

Heres final reading of this lesson.

Conclusion: Search engines are a constant evolving product. Think about how much Yahoo.com has changed in the last 15 years. But there are some basic steps that you can take to achieve high ranking in this every changing product. Next lesson.