Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Accessibility & CSS support packages

This article was written by Trenton Moss. Trenton's crazy about web accessibility and usability - so crazy that he went and started his own web accessibility and usability consultancy to help make the Internet a better place for everyone. He also knows an awful lot about the Disability Discrimination Act.
Now that you have completed your website, it is time to get it listed with the search engines. If you believe that all you need to do is build a website and people will just come and see it, then you are a dreamer It takes time, attention, a lot of patience and sometimes a little money to market and promote your website efficiently. I hope that the following tips will help you succeed in building traffic to your website.
At this point I would like to make a clear distinction between crawler-based search engines and human-powered directories, which are often mixed up. As to the directories, you don't really need to care about the position of your site in their search results -- human visitors hardly ever search there. But to be listed in their index is vital. Getting listed with them helps crawler-based search engines locate your site and perhaps helps it rank better, because of the link importance these sites provide to you. For example, Google's catalog is nothing else than a copy of the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) catalogue. Hence, it is extremely important to be listed with DMOZ to get your site into the Google's search results.

Several years ago the industry was dominated by so-called "words-on-the-page" ranking system, which meant that the more times a word was repeated on the page, the higher rank the page got. The major crawler-based search engines ranked pages based on where and how often search terms appeared on them. Now Google and company give more weight to pages which come from sites with similar content. That is why getting listed with directories helps search engines better define the topic of your website. The most important directories are Open Directory (DMOZ), LookSmart and Yahoo!. Getting a website listed in DMOZ can be very frustrating. We know that being listed will probably help our Google ranking, but getting in can take a very long time. Every website and page that is added to the directory has to be manually reviewed before it is included. DMOZ reported employing more than 60 thousand volunteer editors at the time of writing this article, but this number is misleading -- that is the total number of editors they have had since the project started. They don't in fact have that many editors, nor anywhere near that many.

But the company is growing and expanding its services. Now they report searching more than 4 million sites and have recently introduced new service, called Thumbshots, which allows previewing links before clicking. Yahoo! charges USD 299.00 for express inclusion to the directory within 7 days, otherwise you will have to wait from 2 to 8 weeks. In my opinion, it isn't worth paying $299 to get into directory -- you can get into Yahoo! for free through Google, since it is powered by Google. Optimize for Google, and you are optimizing for Yahoo!. This situation is likely to change after Yahoo! purchased Inktomi last year and announced the plan to develop it and use it as the main powering engine. As for LookSmart, the company is losing its position at a high rate. After LookSmart had lost its largest search portal customer MSN, two more companies -- Inktomi and Sprinks declared that they would not renew their agreements with the company to use its search listings.
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