Search Engines
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Forrester Research found that UK surfers used search engines to find information 81 per cent of the time, links from other sites 59 per cent and online advertising just 20 per cent. (That adds up to 160 per cent, but it is the proportions which are important here - many use more than one approach). So search engines such as www.google.com will probably bring more people to your site than links or ads. Especially Google, since it is responsible for 80 per cent of searches, 35% directly and the rest from powering the likes of AOL, Netscape, Yahoo and BBCi. Essential for company Web sites, valuable for any Web site seeking an audience. All your effort creating a Web site is wasted if no-one ever visits. Note that often only some of your pages will be indexed, so put important, relevant content on the index page and on pages just one click from it where possible.
See how the most important search engines and directories relate to each other - available in a wonderful interactive Flash version and an Acrobat pdf. There is other useful information on the site at bruceclay.com
Feb 2004
Update: The Kelsey Group and BizRate.com jointly conducted an online survey
of more than 5,000 online buyers - people who had made at least one purchase
in the previous year. Search behavior was divided into non-commercial
("not looking for anything to buy") and commercial ("looking
for a business, shopping or doing research before buying").
• Google was cited as the most frequently used search engine by
56% of respondents. That was followed by Yahoo! (21%) and MSN (13%). This
compares with new Nielsen data showing that 39% use Google, 30% use Yahoo!
and 30% use MSN.
• 71% of respondents used search engines seven or more times per
week and 25% used search engines 30 or more times a week.
• 64% of people said that search engines were the "main way"
they find things on the Internet and 6% percent said search engines were
"the only way" they find things online.
Site Submission
The
major search engine companies generally use some form of spider or
'bot' software to trawl through the web looking for sites to index. There
are billions of pages already and you may wait a long time before your
site is indexed - if it ever is! To improve the chance that a search engine
will list your site in search queries, submit your site to that search
engine. This just involves visiting the search company's main site, following
a likely looking link and filling in a form with your url, email address
and perhaps some information about your site - note that some sites recommend
that if your address ends .com or .co.uk or whatever (anything that does
not define a particular page as in http://www.google.com/about.html)
that you add a trailing slash in the style of www.jednet.co.uk/ Many sites
encourage you to add their logo and search facilities to your site.
Your site will rarely be added instantly. It can take four weeks or more with some companies and to add insult Excite offer to charge you a fee for faster processing. Submit a rough homepage with meta tags early in the production process and continue work on the rest of the site so that everything comes together on launch day. Poster ad campaigns frequently employ 'teaser ads' where they hint at something good that will be worth waiting for. Do the same with your temporary index page and then replace it when the site officially goes live. No 'under construction' sites please - nearly all active Web sites are adding content regularly. The search engines come back to re-index frequently so the rest of your content will feature soon and in the meantime at least you have something up there to lure the punters.
Submit
your site to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html