Search Engines

A guide to getting the best from Search Engines

Link building is one of the most important elements to obtaining high rankings in the major search engines.
Although the quantity of inbound links is important, the quality of those links is much more important. Links from sites that are topically relative to your site carry much more weight than links from unrelated sites.

The main Search Engines:

Google - Probably the best know and most popular.

Yahoo - More of a portal and popular for it's email accounts. Second most popular for searches.

Bing - Microsoft's latest attempt to gain ground in the Search Engine business.

Cuil - Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance.

Clusty - Clusty queries several top search engines, combines the results, and generates an ordered list based on comparative ranking, then figures in the meta tags. Then, Instead of delivering millions of search results in one long list, Clusty groups similar results together into clusters.

Directories are important because a lot of the search engines pick up links from them.

Dmoz - The Open Directory Project. This is the most important directory to get listed on. Most of the search engines pick up links from Dmoz. Submissions must always be in the correct category or they will be rejected.

TheLocalWeb - Another very good directory to get listed in.

Google Page Rank

PageRank is one of the methods Google uses to determine the importance of your website.
PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google says that when one page links to another page, it is effectively marking the other page. The more marks that a page gets, the more important the page must be. Additionally the importance of the page that is marking determines how important the mark itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the total marks for it. The importance of each mark is also taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated. Each page of your site may have a different rank. usually the home page is the highest.

PageRank is Google's method of deciding a page's importance. It is important because it is one of the factors that determines a page's position in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

For small businesses it is difficult to get above a PR3 - most small businesses will not get much higher that a PR1 or PR2

Our Google PageRank tool allows you to quickly check the PageRank of any web page. Simply enter the url and the PageRank is just a click away.

Check Page Rank of any web site pages instantly:

This free page rank checking tool is powered by Page Rank Checker service

Social Networking sites are another popular way of promoting your site. Many of them can be quite time consuming and require regular updates to keep people coming back to read what you have posted. Twitter is probably one of the easiest as you are only permitted to use a maximum of 140characters per post (known as a "Tweet").

Customer review sites - where your customers can post their reviews of your business is a good way of promoting your business (as long as you do not get any negative reviews!). Here potential customers can see how good you are. Search engines also pick up on these links.

FreeIndex - being one such site. On FreeIndex the more reviews you get the higher you go up the listing.

If you are in the tourist business Tripadvisor is an absolute must.

Search Engines are regularly updating their policies, new engines come and go.... a good place to keep up with all the latest information is SerachEngineWatch

If you are looking for a list of free directories try Directory Rate or Submithelper for long lists of suggestions (We cannot recommend any that are listed as the list is too long and often changes. - Try at your own risk).

Alexa - is a useful resource to discover information about web sites. A bit like Google, Alexa rates your site, only unlike the Goggle PageRank, with Alexa the lower the number the better. The Alexa PageRank is calculated from data collected from surfers that have the Alexa toolbar installed in their browser. Basically it is a measure of your popularity relative to the other sites. (Interesting to look at? but not so important to worry about if you are not in the top 100,000!)

A few to start you off:
Amfibi	Walhello	Jayde	County Industry
Search Sight	Abacho	InfoTiger	Sygol
FreeIndex	HotFrog	Search Who	ScrubThe Web
Link Centre	BusinessInternet Directory	UKwebUK	3trac

If you find any good free directories and would like to see them listed here please email to directories@3bdesignslive.co.uk