As part of our web site design service, we emphasize relevant keywords on your home page (including the use of meta tags) and register it with several different search engines. The list of these engines is below, although the list is subject to change as the various search engines change over time.

If you still have questions about the various search engines after reading this, our Frequently Asked Questions page or the other links listed in the sidebar may be of some assistance. Please feel free to contact us if you are unable to find the answer to your question(s).

Please note that although we register a site with a search engine, many of them are backlogged and may take weeks to months to add your site. When we give you your site printout upon initial site completion, we will also give you a listing of the search engines we registered your site with and the approximate time that engine has been taking to index web sites. Yahoo! Web Sites (not the same as Yahoo! Web Pages) and LookSmart only accept paid submissions. According to Search Engine Watch and Media Metrix ratings, this is money well spent.

Please let us know if you would like these paid submissions. If not, we will register your site with the search engines not requiring paid submissions.

• Yahoo! Web Sites (requires paid Submission)
• LookSmart (requires paid Submission)
• NBCi.com (formerly Snap.com)
• Open Directory

Non-Directory Based Search Engines

• AltaVista
• Infoseek/Go Network
• HotBot
• AOL Search
• Direct Hit
• Excite
• Fast/All The Web
• Google
• Goto.com
• IWon
• Lycos
• MSN
• Netscape
• Web Crawler
• Yahoo Web Pages (Note that this is different than Yahoo! Web Sites)

Search Engine popularity changes as time passes, but so far Yahoo! has been consistently the most popular. Therefore, even though every search engine may have an algorithm for obtaining a high ranking, pages should be optimized to rank high in the most popular search engines in order to maximize traffic to your site. Current search engine popularity may be viewed at:
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/
As of May 2001, according to Media Matrix Ratings, the top 5 search engines are:

1. Yahoo
2. MSN
3. AOL
4. Lycos
5. Infoseek/Go

This can be somewhat misleading because some of the directory based search engines are used to power the search directories of various Internet Service Providers. For example, LookSmart powers MSN, Excite, and AltaVista. And Open Directory is used as the basis for AOL and Netscape Searches. Consequently, it is very important to be listed correctly in the directory based Search Engines.

The ranking of a person's web site in the various search engines depends on many factors. Some of these factors are listed below, but whether these factors influence your site's ranking depends on the particular search engine and its algorithm for ranking sites. For example, some search engines use Direct Hit technology to determine how many sites link to yours and use that as a measure of your site's popularity, which is then used in determining your ranking. Some search engines use Meta tags and keywords used in your web site's pages. Other search engines do not use meta tags. Some search engines will allow you to submit multiple pages and doorway pages and others (such as the directory based engines) only allow you to submit the home page. Some of the factors that some of the various search engines consider in ranking your site are:

• Keywords in your domain name
• Placement of keyword in title tag
• Link popularity of your site
• How recently pages were submitted
• Keyword placement in body text of page
• Number of keywords in link text of page
• Keywords in image alt tags in your page
• Amount of text on page
• Amount of times keyword appears on page (some search engines penalize you for overusing a keyword)
• Number of words used that are closely synonymous with your keyword
• Alphabetical Listing of Domain Name, all other factors being equal
• Plural form of keywords and capitalization forms are considered the same by some search engines and not by others
• Meta Tags in Page Header
• Domain Name
• Keywords in Heading Text

Consequently, you can see how optimizing for one search engine (which may have emphasize heavy use of keywords) may cause your ranking to go down in another search engine (which may penalize for excessive use of keywords). The key to a higher ranking is to optimize for the most popular search engines.

Because search engine ranking is a moving target and something that has to be monitored closely to achieve and maintain a good ranking, there are entire companies based on helping web sites achieve and maintain a high ranking. The last time we checked, one of the most popular companies charged $1,495.00 for this. We design your site with search engine ranking in mind and provide updates to keep the content of your site fresh, but cannot guarantee a top position in all the search engines. In addition, since hundreds of thousands of new web sites are being added to search engines daily, once you achieve a top ranking, maintaining it can be a full time job as well. This is because newly added sites may cause your position to slip. That is why most of the search engine optimization companies charge a monthly fee in addition to a setup fee, because it is something that has to be continually monitored.

Since we take search engine ranking into consideration while designing your site, but it is not our primary business, if your ranking in the various search engines is not high enough after the various search engines have had a chance to add your site to their database, you may want to consider a third party company for optimization. Please make sure that when you do this that the third party company gives you some kind of guarantee about your ranking, that they don’t do techniques which could get you banned from certain search engines (e.g. adding additional keywords on a page where the text is the same color as the background, having multiple doorway pages, submitting the same page multiple times in the same day to the same engine), and that they are responsible for any updates they may make in optimizing your pages for the search engines. We cannot be responsible for changes made to your pages for third party companies.

If you still have questions about the various search engines after reading this, our Frequently Asked Questions page or the other links listed in the sidebar may be of some assistance.