Free Search Engines

One of the difficult parts of search engine ranking, as we've mentioned before, is that search engines have different ways of deciding how to rank a page. This means, for example, that your page may rank high in Yahoo! but not rank anywhere in Google. Same web site, but valued differently by different search engines.

So submitting your site to 100,000 minor search engines around the world is unlikely to get you very far because you aren't going to be able to produce 100,000 different versions of your web site to please them all. But by working on producing "friendly" versions of your site for each of the top, say, 10 engines, you will achieve far greater results for your investment.

So which search engines should you target? In this article we'll look at the free ones.

The free search engines that generally bring in the most traffic are the following, in approximate order of popularity:

Google
Yahoo
MSN
AOL
Netscape
HotBot

Of course, there are others, but the above free engines cover a huge percentage of the market. This allows you to concentrate your efforts on fewer engines.

Although there have been a number of large search engines move towards paid inclusions over the last few years, there is no doubt that free search engines will always be available and popular. This is because there is a large percentage of people out there who want to see search results that are unfiltered by how much money people have paid. Some of the paid search engines will naturally only display businessess that can afford to pay large sums of money.

So what should your approach be towards the above free search engines. Again, simply submitting your site to them is unlikely to get you far. The above engines have different preferences and "rules" which determine where your site will rank. Some of the engines noted above have similar rules, so in some cases you may be able to create a page that suits more than one engine. Other times though, you may need to create a version of your web page that suits one engine in particular.

The results of this investment are enormous. Across the world it is estimated there are over 1 billion searches made in search engines every day. The results you will get for ranking in the top 30 for 3 of the above engines as opposed to ranking 566th in them all are obvious.

Disclaimer: This page is designed to provide information only and is not a substitute for advice that is specific to your business. Before acting on any of the information above it is important you seek further advice from a professional who has taken into consideration the nature and circumstances of your business.

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