Search engines have the main purpose to index thousands of millions of web pages. Once you look for a word or a phrase, the search engine scans automatically the entire database where it has the stored pages indexed and it returns to you as a result a list containing the most relevant results for that search.

The only criteria are the number of pages found and their relevance depend on are the capabilities of the used search engine.Google has become the largest search engine at present but there is a constant battle between companies to be at the forefront .

Search engines appeared somewhere in the early 90’s when Alan Emtage, a student at the McGill University in Montreal created the first search engine tool. It was called Archie. Its purpose was to search through the information available on the FTP servers. The files on these servers were available for anyone, but one couldn’t use them unless knowing the exact address of the server and of the file.

Archie looked through this database and gathered lists of files for each server. It was used by people to match phrases and characters in order to take them to the server address the file they were looking for was on.

Its creation was the first step in the search engine rally that is going on now. As the public grew more and more aware of the existence of the internet, the need for a search tool became visible.

So, first there were some software robots, using the concept of spidering to index the web, following links from one site to the other and saving the text from all visited websites in a database.

Between 1994 and 1995 three important search engines appeared: Lycos, WebCrawler and AltaVista. At about the same time Yahoo! appeared but Yahoo! is not a search engine. Yes, it has a search engine function, but yahoo is firstly a directory of data and articles, providing different services as email and hosting. Recently yahoo has signed contracts with other search engines as Google for both of them to provide more search results.

Today search engines are in a continuous competition. There are thousands of search engines, but just a few big ones. This small group of top search engines is responsible for more than 90% of online searches.

However, if search engines are free and they can be used by everyone what keeps them financially alive? The answer to the question is very simple: advertising and traffic. The more visits they have, the bigger the traffic then the more money they can make providing AD space.

Search engines are competing to develop the best formulas and algorithms to evaluate the web pages accordingly to the keywords provided.

If someone is looking for a top position in search engines, then he has to be sure that his site is projected in such a way that search engines would find it easily, being relevant for the keywords and phrases the owner wants it to be found by.

SEO tools

Search Engine optimization is of two kinds, Organic and Mechanical. Organic SEO depends on manual or natural ways of optimizing a website and takes more time resulting in long lasting results. Mechanical SEO use software i.e. seo tools to optimize a website. It takes less time but results have a shorter shelf life.

SEO tools are numerous. They are available for keyword verification checking and suggestions, link popularity checks, meta tag optimization, search saturation checking, back link building, search engine ranking etc.

The seo tools are being extensively used today to optimize websites. In the fiercely competitive industries it is very important to be on top of Google, Yahoo or any other search engine rankings to tap targeted audiences. This greatly helps to sustain, grow and expand your business through your website.

Each category of seo tools in turn has a number of software developed by different companies. It is relevant to know which are good before you embark upon using one. Almost all of them have demo versions available for free download. You can always try them out before narrowing your options and buying the best. Remember, SEO tools need to be used carefully or the search engines can black list you.

New to the world of ecommerce and don’t know where to turn? Visit the beginners’ guide to earning online at: http://www.digitalmoneymakers.com

Through search engines and directories, the Internet provides a quick and easy place to choose a local merchant or business.

Just because the Internet is worldwide doesn’t mean local businesses can’t benefit from having a website and a presence in the search engines. Realizing the benefits of local searches Google recently launched “Google Local.” This feature allows searchers to enter in their zip code and search using keywords. When the results are returned they provide the address and phone number of the businesses. Google and MapQuest have partnered to provide maps and directions to the locations that are returned in the search. Yahoo, AOL and MSN also have local capabilities.

The Kelsey Group and ConStat have found that 70% of US households use the internet to shop for local products and services. http://www.imediaconnection.com/news/5319.asp

More and more people are turning to search engines and online yellow pages to search for local companies. A website allows for business owners to provide more information about their products and services than a full-page ad ever could.

An important update to make for your site is adding your physical address to your site pages, in the footer perhaps. This will ensure that the search engine’s indexing spider or bot pick up the address for inclusion in the search engine. Search engine optimization (SEO) is also important so that not only is your address being pulled for inclusion in local results, but your site is found for the correct terms that describe your business. SEO can be performed on an existing site or as part of the development of a site.

Alyssa Duvall is an Internet marketing and a Search Engine Marketing Specialist. She provides proven results for Website promotion. More articles can be found at http://bigoakinc.com/seo-articles/seo-articles.php

This article may be freely reprinted as long as all links and author information remain.

There are tons of ways to promote your website. In another article, I mentioned a few, including having your website on your business cards, in your email signatures and in any way that is specific to your business. Here’s a few more ways to promote your website.

• Start a paper newsletter. Although there are printing costs and postage costs involved with a hard copy newsletter, it will spread the word about your website to people who are not otherwise online on a regular basis. At T&S Web Design, we are in the process of starting a simple, one page newsletter that will be mailed out monthly to clients and potential clients.
• Start an email newsletter. Have a place on your website where people can sign up for the latest updates on your business. Just make sure that you include unsubscribe information as well.
• Write articles in your field of expertise, and include a link to your website.
• Exchange links with related websites. Make sure that they are not directly competing with you but have the same target audience that you do. You can exchange text links or banner ads.
• Submit your link to directories. If you have a vacation home in New Mexico, search the web for "vacation home New Mexico." Look through the first two pages of results and contact all the website owners that have sites listing multiple vacation homes in New Mexico. Give them the info about your vacation home and about your site, and see if they’ll list it. Chances are, many of them will he happy to list it for free, because the more that they have listed, the more people will visit their site, too.

Remember, promote, promote, promote! The more links to your website that are out there, the more business you can get. Try to spend at least two hours a week promoting your website.

Tim is the owner and senior web designer at T&S Web Design. His company has developed and maintained website for dozens of small businesses and organizations. Tim also maintains a blog with free website advice for small business owners, GetASiteOnline.com.

Having a web directory is becoming increasingly popular these days. It can bring many benefits such as delivering an increased amount of new visitors and providing a steady income. Google, Yahoo and MSN contribute heavily to its algorithm. Many webmasters are attracted by the fact that they can get traffic from such directories and would pay a small fee or put a reciprocal link to get their website listed in these directories. These benefits will ultimately improve the promotion of the website.

Webmasters are also very interested with inbound links for improving their PR (Page Rank) with Google. A good PR gives better position in Google’s search engine results. In theory the more quality inbound links you get, the higher your PR will go. Directories give a good solution for all webmasters. They also prove to be a good addition to existing web sites.

We can differentiate 3 types of directories: free, reciprocal-link and Paid for Inclusion directories:

1) Free directories are by far the most interesting for webmasters as they can give a high PR without having to spend a penny. However you’ll have to spend some time submitting your website to all of these. They don’t usually give you much traffic either as there is an over abundance of them on the internet.

2) Reciprocal-Link directories require placing a small link into the webmaster’s website. This can be dangerous if the directory has been black listed by Google.

3) Finally, Paid For Inclusion directories can deliver very good results as they usually give better PR and have more traffic than free directories.

However, not all directories will give you good results. Many use a redirect function for linking to your website. Your website won’t benefit from such links. You’ll need a static outgoing link from directories to gain weight with search engines. Many of the directories do offer you deep-linking options which mean that they will allow you to submit more than one URL from your domain in order to get your internal pages more traffic and ranking.

So keep in mind that directories are wholly beneficial for your websites as long as you take the time to carefully plan the submission beforehand by checking if they are not using tricks (redirects, reciprocal). Also, don’t forget to submit your website to the most relevant category on the directory and to read its description!

Francois Panassac is the owner of Creascripts Ltd. http://www.creascripts.com propose a collection of Asp and Asp.net scripts. The most popular is Creadirectory which allows you to build a fully branded, search engine friendly web directory similar to Yahoo! and Dmoz, but only at a fraction of their cost. It includes many great features including Google sitemap generator, Paypal integration, Adsense inclusion, static or dynamic URLs and much more.

Think you know everything about searching with Google? Think again. Believe it or not, there are many tools and features available on Google that can be useful for marketing research as well as wasting time. Learn more below about Google’s coolest features.

What are people saying about your site?

Find out what people say about your site or anything else with Google WebQuotes. A Google Lab experiment, Google WebQuotes annotates the results of your Google search with comments from other websites. This offers a convenient way to get a third party’s opinion about each of the returns for your search, providing you with more information about that site’s credibility and reputation. Try your site name and variations, such as "Big Oak", "www.bigoakinc.com" and "http://www.bigoakinc.com" to see what results they bring up.

Google Suggest

As you type your keywords into the search box, Google Suggest offers keyword suggestions in real time. It will provide a list of suggestions as you type in your search criteria, ranked by the number of occurrences that the suggestions appear in Google’s index.

Google Sets

Google Sets automatically create sets of items from a few examples - in essence, it determines other items in a set based on similarity. Here is an example of what we mean. Say you like certain authors such as Stephen King and Dean Koontz, both horror writers, but you don’t know who else to try? Well, Google Sets can recommend a host of authors who write horror novels or other people in the horror field. Imagine how it could help when scouring for keywords and phrases that you may not think of. Ah, the power of Google. Google Alerts

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

* monitoring a developing news story

* keeping current on a competitor or industry

* getting the latest on a celebrity or event

* keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

Website Backgrounds

If you type in "info:(your website’s URL)", Google will provide you background information about any site on the Internet. For instance, "info:www.bigoakinc.com" will show information about our homepage. Note there can be no space between info: and the web page URL.

Google can show you the following information for a URL:

* Show Google’s cache of the URL

* Find web pages that are similar the URL

* Find web pages that link to the URL

* Find web pages that the URL links to

* Find web pages that contain the term "(your website’s URL)"

View indexed pages

If you use [site:(your website’s URL)] as your query, Google will restrict the results to those websites in the given domain. For instance, [site:www.bigoakinc.com] will find pages within www.bigoakinc.com. Note there can be no space between the "site:" and the web page URL.

More than a Search Engine

As you can see, Google can be much more than a simple search engine. It can be a creative marketing and research tool as well. Many other features are available on Google’s site so take some time and look around next time you visit Google.

Shell Harris is an Internet marketing consultant and an SEO Specialist.
He provides proven results for Website promotion. More articles can be found at http://bigoakinc.com/seo-articles/seo-articles.php

This article may be freely reprinted as long as all links and author information remain.

A growing number of online entrepreneurs are finding success with article directory submission services. Website operators, business owners and internet traffic specialists have found article marketing to be a valuable tool in their success.

If you’ve ever read an article on a website and noticed a brief paragraph, located at the bottom of the article, detailing the author’s name and website, then you have already experienced the success of an article directory. An entrepreneur prepares an article, which is centered around their niche and submits it to an article directory. Other webmasters are constantly in search of new material for their website, so they often visit an article directory for information. They may see this article and decide to add it to their site with the condition that the author is given full credit at the bottom of the feature. The credit will likely include the author’s name, brief bio and link to their website.

For each individual who reads an article directory, there is added potential for new customers. If they weren’t interested in your specialty, they wouldn’t be reading the article. So, you’ve already reached someone who has a direct interest in your product or niche. Once they are finished reading the article, they are likely to visit your website if they found the information to be valuable.

Article directory submission services are free to writers, as well as webmasters. Consider that you are opening an internet jewelry store and need to gain interest, spread the word and find customers for your new business. Well, you are obviously a jewelry expert since that’s your chosen business, so write about it. Select a topic, write a brief feature, offer advice and submit the final copy to an article directory. At the bottom, always be sure to include a brief paragraph with your name, some information about your new company and a link to your website. When other webmasters stop by the article directory in search of news for their site, they may be inclined to use your work on their website. If they do, they will also include a link back to your site.

Article directory services provide the potential for a large amount of increased traffic and exposure for a new, or existing, website. There is no better way to gain respect in your profession than by being knowledgeable about what you do. If you are, it will show through in your work and people will be drawn into your site in search of even more information. Article directory services are one of the most powerful new tools available to online entrepreneurs and, best of all - they are free!

Vincent Abrugar is the webmaster of http://www.topicnow.com an article directory where you can submit articles and get free content for your website.

This may seem like a strange suggestion but you can use outbound links to develop content for your site that can be targeted to the keywords that you would like. What tends to happen on the net is that the same description, usually scripted by the sites webmaster, appears all over the place in the form of back links and as such can be deemed as repetitive and take a penalty from the search engines.

My suggestion would be to invest ten minutes of your time and rewrite the description of the web site in question, this would allow you to target the keywords that you want to and also enable you to increase your pages targeted keyword density and fine tune it so that it works in your favour and provides great content for the search engines.

I would also suggest that you use a few web site reviews on the same page in order to further increase that pages keyword density, this works great because depending on the keyword that your are targeting you may find it hard to place enough keywords and key phrases into the page so that it reads right (don’t forget a human has to read it!).

Whereas if you review a few sites all within your targeted area then it becomes extremely easy to develop a highly search engine optimised page that has great keyword density that is still very readable and user friendly to a human viewer.

You may also want to further increase the keyword density by including one of your own articles about the subject in question above the web site reviews and then lead out onto the web site reviews, whilst remembering to strategically place a few links to your own pages (or even adsense code) before them. This gives the reader the opportunity of either continuing onto another one of your pages and staying on your site, clicking the adsense for further information and earning you some revenue or clicking onto one of the web sites for further information. Remember to make the link open in a new window so that your site is still in the browser and encourage the reader to return.

The result is a human friendly page that is highly search engine optimised with a great keyword density that also gives unique content to your site.

Mike - Webmaster and eBay Power Seller at Online Auction Trader

We offer free templates, information and product sourcing to enable you to develop your online auctions into a sustainable, long term income stream.

We also operate a Traders Forum where any advice can be sought on any aspect of Online Trading.

Becoming an SEO expert, or a search engine optimization expert, is something that is worth your while if you are interested in getting your web page noticed and increasing your traffic. It is not hard to become an SEO expert if you simply know what steps you need follow to take you there. As long as you follow these steps and are diligent, you will become the SEO expert you want to be. Read the following topics, then research them more to learn exactly what will put you above the majority of all webmasters.

Topic #1 Keywords

Keywords are a huge part of becoming a search engine optimization expert. The reason for this is that keywords are used by the search engines to find and rank their results. You must become an expert at using keywords that apply to your products and services in order to become a search engine optimization expert.

Topic #2 Links

Developing a link campaign is another important aspect of becoming an SEO expert. The reason for this is that links play an important role in how web pages are ranked by the search engines. The more links a website has present on the Internet, the higher weight and ultimate ranking it will be given by the search engine. If you want to be an SEO expert, you need to learn all you can about links and the role they play in the search engines.

Topic #3 Pay per Click Advertising

Pay per click advertising is another important topic that relates to an SEO expert. This type of advertising is used on search pages when particular keywords are searched for. Your website only pays for this type of advertising when someone clicks on your ad, hence the name "pay per click". The PPC advertising element is important to the success of many websites and results in increased traffic. As an SEO expert, you need to know all there is to know about pay per click advertising.

Topic #4 Directories

Directories are another aspect of getting websites optimized for search engines. Submitting your site to directories not only provides valuable incoming links to your website, it also sends you targeted visitors from those particular directories. To become an expert on search engine optimization, you will need to study and learn everything about directories and how they can be used by a website to build business and drive traffic.

Topic #5 Expert

You should strive to be an expert on something. It is fine to learn all about the different tools to become a search engine optimization expert, however you will also need to be an expert on specific topics and have certain niche topics where you are viewed as an expert.

Michael Turner reveals his foolproof way to increase website traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it free right now at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/

There’s a new phenomenon on the Internet – one that you may not have heard of before. It’s called pixel advertising.

Pixel advertising is just what it sounds like. You purchase pixels, instead of text or banner links on a website. For most pixel sites, you are free to choose from 100 pixels all the way to a million.

The pixel sites work like this. The site has 10 pixel by 10 pixel squares across the page. These squares make up a nice little grid. Each square, then, is for sale. You can combine these squares to make a bigger impression.

To purchase a square, you’ll need to know the size you want to purchase, and you should have a graphic pre-made for your selection. If you want a default square, you’d make a 10 pixel by 10 pixel graphic. Granted, not much is going to fit into that little square, but if you get prime placement, you may be able to get away with it.

The amount of pixel advertising websites is also becoming more widespread, which is driving down prices. While the very first sites were charging a dollar a pixel, it is not unusual to see pricing as low as ten cents a pixel (or ten dollars per square) now.

These sites also do some good for their advertisers. If they are popular enough, the links provided will drive more traffic to their websites. If they are paying a fairly low price for their box, they are probably getting a good amount of traffic. This traffic, hopefully, leads to higher revenue for the advertisers.

While pixel advertising is definitely not here to stay, we should all enjoy the ride. These sites make it easy and affordable for advertisers to get one-way backlinks that they need, and they drive more traffic to their site for a minimal cost.

Will Hanke runs LawPixels.net, a niche pixel advertising website for the legal profession. He is also owner of Lighthouse Technologies, a web development and hosting company in the USA.

In the past few days I’ve been doing quite a bit of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and in the have begun to wonder just how good the search engine Google really is - and will be in the future. A recent conversation with a good friend really started me thinking - as I explained all the different techniques for optimizing a webpage, and the techniques that Google considers "Search Engine Spam", I kept receiving the same reply: "Man, that’s dumb!"

The most repeated advice given out by professional SEO’s is to follow Google’s Information For Webmasters. Many of these guidelines can be filed either under common sense, or just plain best-practice. In general, these are things that you should be doing already. There are other things that affect a web page’s listing in the search results that aren’t covered in Google’s information. One of the things that search engines including Google like, is pages with regularly updated content. While having a website where the content changes daily or even monthly might be useful to some, it doesn’t work for all websites. Consider an article writen about a specific event, say the 9/11 attacks on the US. Should this content be changed often? And should this page be penalized for not being updated? Common sense says no, but unfortunately the search engines don’t agree.

Another thing that search engines like are sites with many, many pages. My largest concern here is that with new technologies like AJAX picking up steam all over the web, we’re beginning to see the end of sites with hundreds of individual pages. And since Google still can’t index sites that use frames, which have been around forever, can we ever expect them to index sites that use AJAX? Personally I like the idea of being able to create a website that consists of a single page and have the content dynamically update or change without the user having to either wait for the page to reload or navigate to another page.

In other words, if a designer or SEO were to stay completely true to all of the guidelines and techniques to optimize a page, all of there sites would look like they were created in 1995. Seriously! Think about all the things search engines don’t like or don’t get along with. They love text links, they don’t like images as links, they can’t index frames or Flash, they don’t like javascript, and they hate splash pages. All of these have become commonplace on the web today in order to enhance the user experience, and the search engine companies keep telling us to design sites for the user first. Looks to me that they are just adding insult to injury by setting us up for failure.

In my opinion, one of the biggest problems is companies like Google and Yahoo is that they are getting away from what they do best and what they were conceived to be - Search Engines. Although some of Google’s tools like Desktop Search, Maps, Gmail, and Video are cool, they are distracting them from fixing some of the fundamental problems with search engine technology today.

I understand that Google isn’t the only search engine out there but it is by far the most popular. Forget hits, just look at their earnings report and stock price. It is for this reason why most SEO’s and web developers, including myself, optimize for Google first. If todays search engines, including the industry leader Google don’t get their act together and figure out how to embrace and index sites that are using some of these new, and for that matter old, technologies, the question will be whether they will be of any use to us in the world of Web 2.0?

William Mandra
http://www.m-networks.net