Submitting your website to a Search Engine
In order to implement effective search engine optimisation, you need to know how to optimise your site in order to get great rankings and this entails a thorough understanding of how search engines build their databases. Major search engines do not have their own databases, so you have to first submit your site details to a database builder.
How do major search engines work?
Search engines can be either automated; if they are they are called ‘crawlers’, or they are work by manually mining data, these are called ‘directories’.
Crawlers latch on to links on your pages and build their databases from the words they find in the text on your public pages. They match keywords which you provide on submission. No one knows exactly what the search engine algorithms are, it seems that a few occurrences of keywords help search engines to more easily understand a web page However, spamming pushes rankings down, so don’t litter your pages. Google is a ‘crawler’ search engine, so too is AltaVista.
Directory search engines employ people to conduct the same searches, manually. This takes much longer to get included in a database and these search engines charge a fee for this service.
How is Indexing and Ranking is carried out?
Categorising a website can only be done by conducting on the basis of ‘frequency of occurrence’ which takes into account keywords or key phrases in the copy on the web pages you have submitted. On submission, search engines ask four things of a site owner. They ask what the title of the site is. They ask for a short description of the site as well as a set of keywords or key phrases and they ask the site owner for a category.
