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Online Manual - Search Engines - Surveying & Learning
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Surveying & Learning

Make a list of the top 10 or 15 search engines. A good place to find them all listed is at Search.com. These at Search.com, along with any others listed at the Netscape Search Page, are the ones that 99.5% or more of the Internet population uses.

Now, you must visit each and every site and determine what methods they use to grade home pages. Find out how they determine which pages gets first on the results list of a key word search. There are 3 ways in which you can do this.

The first way, is to simply visit the site and look around at their submission guidelines, rules, etc. Normally, a search engine company will list exactly how they grade pages. It is probably a good idea at this point to print out these rules for your reference. Keep good records of each search engine and their method of grading pages.

Second, if there is no list of rules, or you simply can't find it, you can e-mail them and ask.

Finally, you may want to do this in addition to the other two methods, is to do a keyword search yourself for each search engine. Use any keyword you like, but don't make it too general. When the search results come back, take note of the title and description of the very first listing. Click on the entry and go to their page. Now use your Browsers "view source" button to see what their code is like, or better yet, use the Browser's "save" button to save a copy of their code on your hard drive.

View the code to see why they came up first. Do they have the keyword in their title repeated numerous times? Do they have keywords listed somewhere in the title? Take a good look and see if their page design fits with what the search company says they use for grading pages. Some things are not apparent by just viewing the document with your browser. You must look at the source file.

Check out a listing that appears lower in the results. Look at the title, description, and finally its code. Try to determine why it did not appear as high as the others. You can learn a lot about how search engines work by doing this type of analysis.

One problem with this, is that many people now use programs to write or create their home pages for them. These programs have nice user interfaces that allow you drag and drop elements onto the page, and let you see what your page will actually look like. They require no knowledge of basic html code. In this way, you do not become familiar with html code, and it will be more difficult to determine what is actually going on. These programs also do not let you tailor your home page. It is essential that you understand html code to be able to adapt your home pages so that you get them closer to the top of those keyword searches. At this point, if you do not know anything, or have just a basic knowledge of html code, then I urge you to stop here and learn. It is not very difficult to learn, and gives you total control over your documents. There are many good sources on the Internet where you can learn how to write your home pages directly using html elements. A good starting point is at Netscape's site where they have a basic beginners guide. I recommend going there and printing out all of the help documents and placing them in a binder. This will aid you in learning, and also can be used as a reference guide in the future.

Now that you have your list of search database sites, and have a fairly good idea what it takes to get your site listed for particular keywords, you are ready for the next step.


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