What You should know about Search Engines

There are three major players in the search engines industry.

Ranking:

#1 Google - 47%
#2 Yahoo - 33%
#3 MSN - 10%
#4 Others - 10%

All other providers are sharing the remaining 15%
· Competition in this area is heated and search engines are squaring it out for the top spot.
· Google and Yahoo also power the free and paid listings featured in AOL, Netscape, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, Hot Bot, Teoma, Lycos, Alta Vista, and All the Web.
· MSN is also coming out with their own search engine technology and may not be powered by Yahoo for long.
· These search engines are occasionally changing their algorithms to provide the most reliable information that it can give to its users.

Why are these facts important?

· In order for you to be successful with your online business, you have to optimize your site including your tools and resources, for you to have a high ranking with the search engines.
· Knowing which major player is powering your search engine will enable you to focus on the optimization of your sales effort. It will open up choices for you to select search engines that will give you better traffic.
· The occasional change that is being done in their algorithms changes occasionally the rules of the game. The tools that you used last time to improve your rankings may not work out on the next.

This however minimizes the trick used to gain high-ranking spots. It also maintains the integrity of free search and maintains the reliability of the search engines at providing information.

Search engines performances are continuously being upgraded. It is being designed to detect keyword stuffing and spamming techniques. Because of this, lists can be dropped from the rankings and marketers will find themselves working hard on revamping and resubmitting their sites to be listed again.

Search engines have learned to identify the tricks and it does not want to be manipulated by marketers.

Imagine coming out with a very good strategy to put a business on a high rank only to find out that the tactics used were what the search engines has been designed to detect and cross out. Many merchants have been doing this only to find out later that they have to re work their sites all over again. You wouldn't want the same thing happening to you. The best trick is to work patiently with the search engines.

Following is a list on what search engines are looking for when it indexes a site:

Creating free for all linkages. Creating linkages on pages in your site that invites everyone ranks very low in search engine relevancy ratings. Your rating points will go down with it.

Creating link farms. This is an old spammer trick that angers search engines, creating multiple and tiered link sites that points to theirs. Even when string of keywords are used and intentions well hidden, the search engines will detect this one.

Creating Irrelevant links. Search engines will detect irrelevant links. When the search engine finds links that have nothing to do with the content of the site linked to your web, it will drop your relevancy ratings.

Creating irrelevant keywords. You could be penalized for irrelevant keywords that are not relevant to the content of your site.

Keyword stuffing the meta tags. Repetitious keywords in the Meta tags do not earn high rankings anymore.