At the moment the top ten
search sites - meaning both directories and search engines account for
just over 93% of all search engine referred traffic going to websites.
The other 6.something% is made up of hundreds of sites claiming to be
search engines.
Even at that the 11th - 15th biggest search engines make up most of
that figure. What are the search sites you need to concentrate on as a
webmaster looking to drive proper traffic to your site? You might ask.
Well here's the sites I consider the most important. This list is of
course open to interpretation, but here's my opinion anyhow. A point
to note is that the first five sites on the list are ordered by
importance to webmasters and not necessarily by the amount of traffic
the individual site can send to a website.
Yahoo although losing ground to Google is still a very popular place
for surfers to search on. Its search results are provided by Google so
in all but a few cases good rankings in Google means good rankings in
Yahoo. The Yahoo directory is still very popular with surfers so check
out
for the lowdown on getting into their index.
(ODP)
Dmoz.org itself will not send you much traffic, I have ranked it the
third most important search site anyhow as its true importance lies in
the fact that lots of third party sites including Google use ODP data
on their sites. What this means is that if your listed on dmoz.org you
will soon notice your site is being found on sites such as the Google
Directory, AOL search, Netscape Search and Lycos to name just a few.
is a very detailed guide written by
me on getting into the ODP successfully.
Just like dmoz.org's main attraction is that it supplies data to many
third party sites so too is Looksmarts. Their networks claims to reach
vast numbers of people. However your main advantage of listing with
Looksmart stems from the fact that MSN use their data prominently
within results for searches conducted on MSN.com, MSN.co.uk and other
international MSN's. If you're a non commercial site you can get into
looksmart via
(Fast)
Alltheweb.com is a very popular search engine which is currently
seeing much growth. Link popularity is a factor on this engine so get
them links, also having keywords within <h1> and <h2> tags seems to be
quite important here.
Here in no particular
order are the other sites I consider important for anybody conducting
a search engine campaign.
- Mentioned briefly above, still very important.
- Not a popular as it used to be, but still can drive decent traffic.
- Used by millions of AOL subscribers everyday.
- Still very popular.
- Can be a source of lots of very cheap targeted traffic.
- Very popular site. You can't just submit your site to About as
you would with other engines, you must contact the guide of the
appropriate category first and ask him or her to list your site. Only
content driven sites will get a listing here.
Only the big search engines count
