This
glossary or list of search engine terms is designed to help your understand search
engine terms and general IT terms. The information is "as is" and
any errors can be reported here
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y A Adjacency A property of the
relationship between words in a search engine (or directory) query. Search engines
often allow users to specify that words should be next to one another or somewhere
near one another in the web pages searched. Altavista A
popular search engine with the largest database on the web, indexing more than
140 million pages. Its main URL is http://www.altavista.com/.
Until 1998, this search engine provided the search facility for Yahoo. Altavista indexes all the words in a web
page, and new pages are normally added to the database fairly quickly, within
a couple of working days. You are asked to submit just the main page of your site.
The Altavista spider will then explore your site and index a representative sample
of the pages. Some problems with spamming have been noticed. The use of keyword
meta tags is penalised. Altavista places various alternative options before its
search results, including suggested questions (using the Ask Jeeves service). Paid entries are beginning
to appear at the start of the search results. AOL Drives it's results
from the open directory project and Google. Applet A small program,
often written in Java , which usually runs in a web browser, as
part of a web page. It is possible that the use of such a program may cause spiders
and robots to stop indexing a page. ArchitextSpider The name of the
Excite search engine's spider. Ask Jeeves A meta search
engine which can be asked questions in English. This service is also in use at
Altavista. http://www.askjeeves.com/.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
C CGI Common
Gateway Interface - a standard interface between web server software and other
programs running on the same machine. CGI Program Strictly, any program
which handles its input and output data according to the CGI standard. In practice,
CGI programs are used to handle forms and database queries on web pages, and to
produce non-static web page content. Client A computer, program or
process which makes requests for information from another computer, program or
process. Web browsers are client programs. Search engine spiders are (or can be
said to behave as) clients. Click Through The process of clicking
on a link in a search engine output page to visit an indexed site. This is
an important link in the process of receiving visitors to a site via search engines.
Good ranking may be useless if visitors do not click on the link which leads to
the indexed site. The secret here is to provide a good descriptive title and an
accurate and interesting description. Comment The HTML <!-- and
--> tags are used to hide text from browsers. Some search engines ignore text
between these symbols but others index such text as if the comment tags were not
there. Comments are often used to hide javascript code from non-compliant browsers, and
sometimes (notably on Excite) to provide invisible keywords to some
search engines. Crawler See Spider.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
D Dead Link An
Internet link which doesn't lead to a page or site, probably because the server
is down or the page has moved or no longer exists. Most search engines have techniques
for removing such pages from their listings automatically, but as the Internet
continues to increase in size, it becomes more and more difficult for a search
engine to check all the pages in the index regularly. Reporting of dead links
helps to keep the indexes clean and accurate, and this can usually be done by
submitting the dead link to the search engine. De-listing The removal
of pages from a search engine's index. Removal can occur for various reasons,
including unreliability of the machine that hosts a site or because of perceived
attempts at spamdexing. Description Descriptive text associated with
a web page and displayed, usually with the page title and URL, when the page appears
in a list of pages generated by a search engine or directory as a result of a
query. Some search engines take this description from the DESCRIPTION Meta tag - others generate their own from the
text in the page. Directories often use text provided at registration. Direct Hit A system
which monitors the search engine users' selections from search engine results,
counting which results are clicked on most, and how long visitors spend at that
site, so as to improve relevancy. Used by HotBot and as a plug-in to Apple's new innovative
Sherlock search system. See http://www.directhit.com/.
Directory A server or a collection of servers dedicated to indexing
Internet web pages and returning lists of pages which match particular queries.
Directories (also known as Indexes) are normally compiled manually, by user submission
(such as at whatsnew.com), and often
involve an editorial selection and/or categorisation process (such as at LookSmart and Yahoo). Dogpile A meta search engine.
Found at http://www.dogpile.com/.
Domain A sub-set of Internet addresses. Domains are hierarchical,
and lower-level domains often refer to particular web sites within a top-level
domain. The most significant part of the address comes at the end - typical top-level
domains are .com, .edu, .gov, .org (which sub-divide addresses into areas of use).
There are also various geographic top-level domains (e.g. .ar, .ca, .fr, .ro etc.)
referring to particular countries. The relevance to search engine terminology
is that web sites which have their own domain name (e.g. http://www.nativetongues.com)
will often achieve better positioning than web sites which exist as a sub-directory
of another organisation's domain (e.g. http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/tijana/).
Dynamic content Information on web pages which changes or is changed
automatically, e.g. based on database content or user information. Sometimes it's
possible to spot that this technique is being used, e.g. if the URL ends with
.asp, .cfm, .cgi or .shtml. It is possible to serve dynamic content using standard
(normally static) .htm or .html type pages, though. Search engines will currently
index dynamic content in a similar fashion to static content, although they will
not usually index URLs which contain the ? character.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
E Euroseek A
search engine which concentrates on information relating to Europe. The URL is
http://www.euroseek.com/.
Excite Regarded as one of the best search engines, with an index
of 55 million pages. It can be slow to index new sites. The URL is http://www.excite.com/. Sites
using frames must have a NOFRAMES section in order to
be listed. Some spamming has been noticed. Excite previously ignored the DESCRIPTION
meta tag, but is now using this in its listings
(although the contents do not affect relevancy, which is based mainly on the title
and body text). Excite has an audio/video search facility which is a branded component
of RealNetworks' RealPlayer G2.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
F Fake Copy Listings Sometimes
a malicious company will steal a web page or the entire contents of a web site,
re-publish at a different URL and register with one or more search engines. This
can cause a loss of traffic from the original site if the search engines position
the copy higher in the listings. If you find that someone has stolen your site
in this way, write to the company concerned and ask them to remove the stolen
content. Also contact the hosting service used by the company, any company that
benefits from the theft and any search engine(s) concerned. If the thieves refuse
to remove the material or ignore you, obtain legal advice. It is also well worth
having printed evidence to support your claim that your copy of the material was
there first, and that you have the copyright! False Drop A web page
retrieved from a search engine or directory which is not relevant to the query
used. This could be for one of the following reasons: The web page contained
the keywords entered, but used in the wrong context, with a different meaning
or with a different inter-relationship to that expected. - The web page
is an attempt at spamdexing.
- The search engine has a fault in its database
or a bug in its query program.
Frames An HTML technique
for combining two or more separate HTML documents within a single web browser
screen. Compound interacting documents can be created to make a more effective
web page presented in multiple windows or sub-windows. A framed web site often
causes great problems for search engines, and may not be indexed correctly. Search
engines will often index only the part of a framed site within the <NOFRAMES>
section, so make sure that the <NOFRAMES> section includes relevant text
which can be indexed by the spiders.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
G Go.com A portal
partnership between Infoseek and Disney, with search capabilities based on the
Infoseek index, at http://go.com/.
Gulliver The name of the Northern Light Search Engine's spider.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
H Heading Many
search engines give extra weight and importance to the text found inside HTML
heading sections. It is generally considered good advice to use headings when
designing web pages and to place keywords inside headings. Hit In
the context of visitors to web pages, a hit (or site hit) is a single access request
made to the server for either a text file or a graphic. If, for example, a web
page contains ten buttons constructed from separate images, a single visit from
someone using a web browser with graphics switched on (a "page view") will involve
eleven hits on the server. (Often the accesses will not get as far as your server
because the page will have been cached by a local Internet service provider).
In the context of a search engine query, a hit is a measure of the number of
web pages matching a query returned by a search engine or directory. Hotbot
One of the largest search engines, indexing 110 million pages. Powered
by Inktomi, new submissions appear to be taking two
weeks or longer to appear. The URL is http://www.hotbot.com/. HTML
HyperText Markup Language - the (main) language used to write web pages.
HTTP HyperText Transfer Protocol - the (main) protocol used
to communicate between web servers and web browsers (clients).
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
I Image Map A
set of hyperlinks attached to areas of an image. This may be defined within a
web page, or as an external file. If the image map is defined as an external
file, search engines may have problems indexing your other pages, unless you duplicate
the links as conventional text hyperlinks. If the image map is included within
the web page, the search engines should have no problem following the links, although
it's good practice to provide text links too, to aid the visually impaired and
those accessing the web with graphics switched off or using text only browsers.
Inbound Link A hypertext link to a particular page from elsewhere,
bringing traffic to that page. Inbound links are counted
to produce a measure of the page popularity. Searches for the inbound links
to a page can be made on Altavista, Infoseek and Hotbot. Index See Directory. Also refers to the database of web
pages maintained by a search engine or directory. Infind A meta search engine. Found at http://www.infind.com/. Infoseek
One of the largest search engines. New sites are normally added very
quickly, within one or two business days. The URL is http://www.infoseek.com/.
Infoseek is one of the few search engines to treat singular and plural forms as
the same word. Very sensitive to page popularity in its positioning algorithm. Inktomi The
database used by some of the largest search engines, including Hotbot. Inktomi is also used by Yahoo when no matches are found in Yahoo's own
database.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
J Java A
computer programming language whose programs can run on a number of different
types of computer and/or operating system. Used extensively to produce applets for web pages. Javascript A
simple interpreted computer language used for small programming tasks within HTML
web pages. The scripts are normally interpreted (or run) on the client computer
by the web browser. Some search engines have been known to index these scripts,
presumably erroneously.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
K Keyword A
word which forms (part of) a search engine query. Keyword Density A property
of the text in a web page which indicates how close together the keywords appear.
Some search engines use this property for positioning. Analysers are available which allow
comparisons between pages. Pages can then be produced with the similar keyword
densities to those found in high ranking pages. Keyword Domain Name The
use of keywords as part of the URL to a website. Positioning is improved on some search engines
when keywords are reinforced in the URL. Keyword Phrase A phrase
which forms (part of) a search engine query. Keyword Purchasing The
buying of search keywords from search engines, usually to control banner ad placement.
All the major search engines (except EuroSeek and Overture) insist that keyword purchasing is only
used for banner ad placement, and doesn't influence search results. The display
of banner ads for bought keywords can be studied using a service called Bannerstake
from Thomson and Thomson at http://www.namestake.com which returns the banner
ads displayed when particular queries are used.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
L Link Popularity See
page popularity. Log File A file
maintained on a server in which details of all file accesses are stored. Analysing
log files can be a powerful way to find out about a web site's visitors, where
they come from and which queries are used to access a site. Various software
packages are available to analyse log files, and some are listed below. Sane Solutions provide NetTracker, which is good
at analysing queries from log files. A free program called WebLog is available
at http://www.awsd.com/. See also
the reviews at http://www.bellacoola.com/html/sample_reports.htm?isg.
LookSmart A medium-sized directory. The URL is http://www.looksmart.com/.
Lycos One of the largest search engines, Lycos appears to be moving
towards becoming a directory and is using the Open Directory for some search results. It can
be slow to index new sites. The lycos spider ignores meta tags in pages. Lycos
can be found at http://www.lycos.com/.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
M Metacrawler A
meta search engine found at http://www.metacrawler.com/.
Results from various search engines are summarised in an easy to read form. Metafind
A meta search engine found at http://www.metacrawler.com/.
Meta Search A search of searches. A query is submitted to more than
one search engine or directory, and results are reported from all the engines,
possibly after removal of duplicates and sorting. Also the meta search engine of the same name, found at
http://www.metasearch.com/.
Meta Search Engine A server which passes queries on to many search
engines and/or directories and then summarises all the results. Ask Jeeves, Dogpile, Infind, Metacrawler, Metafind and Metasearch are examples of meta search engines.
Meta Tag A construct placed in the HTML header of a web page, providing
information which is not visible to browsers. The most common meta tags (and those
most relevant to search engines) are KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION. The KEYWORDS
tag allows the author to emphasise the importance of certain words and phrases
used within the page. Some search engines will respond to this information - others
will ignore it. Don't use quotes around the keywords or keyphrases. The DESCRIPTION
tag allows the author to control the text of the summary displayed when the page
appears in the results of a search. Again, some search engines will ignore this
information. The HTTP-EQUIV meta tag is used to issue HTTP commands, and is
frequently used with the REFRESH tag to refresh page content after a given number
of seconds. Pages sometimes use this technique to force browsers to a different
page or site. Most search engines are wise to this, and will index the final page
and/or reduce the ranking. Infoseek has a strong policy against this technique,
and they might penalise your site, or even ban it. Other common meta tags
are GENERATOR (usually advertising the software used to generate the page) and
AUTHOR (used to credit the author of the page, and often containing e-mail address,
homepage URL and other information). Misspellings People quite often
spell words incorrectly when using search engines. Pages which use common misspellings
will quite often receive extra hits, so it is a useful technique to include common
misspellings of words in alt tags, keywords, page names and titles. A similar
effect occurs when spaces are missed out and words are accidentally joined together.
MultiCrawl A parallel search engine which offers users their own
branded versions. http://www.multicrawl.com/.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
N Netfind See
AOL Netfind. NewHoo See the Open Directory Project. Northern Light A
search engine with an additional "pay to access" special collection of business,
health and consumer publication articles. The first search engine to ban meta search engines from its database. The URL
is http://www.northernlight.com/.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
O Open Directory Project
A directory project run by thousands of volunteer editors. In principal,
this is a very exciting and powerful way to organise the web. In practice, there
have been some problems with the behaviour of some of the editors, which has caused
some initial difficulty for the organisers. Initially known as NewHoo, the project
is now part of Netscape (and therefore of AOL). See http://directory.mozilla.org/.
Open Text A large business-only directory. The URL is http://www.opentext.com/.
Optimization Changes made to a web page to improve the positioning
of that page with one or more search engines. A means of helping potential customers
or visitors to find a web site. Optimization may involve design/layout changes,
new text for the title-tags, meta-tags, alt- attributes, headings, and changes
to the first 200-250 words of the main text. A large image map at the top of a
page should be moved further down the page. Frames should be avoided (unless navigational
links are also provided within the frames). Overture (previously GoTo) A
search engine, powered by Inktomi, which only returns one URL per domain
in its search results. Operates a "pay per click" scheme where websites can pay
to increase their relevancy. The URL is http://www.overture.com/.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
P Page Popularity A
measure of the number and quality of links to a particular page (inbound links).
Many search engines (and most noticeably Infoseek) are increasingly using this number as
part of the positioning process. The number and quality of
inbound links is becoming as important as the optimisation of page content. A
free service to measure page popularity can be found at http://www.linkpopularity.com/.
Page View Used in site statistics as a measure of pages viewed rather
than server hits. Many server hits may be made to access a single page, causing
many separate log file entries. Analysis software can determine that these server
hits were generated when a visitor viewed a single page, and group them together
to provide this more useful method of counting visitors. See also Hit and Unique Visitor. Placement See Positioning. Politeness Window In
order not to overburden any particular server, most search engine spiders limit
their access to each server. If your page is hosted on the same server as thousands
of other pages, the spider may never get the time to reach (and index) your page.
This can be a powerful argument for having your own server. Portal Site
A generic term for any site which provides an entry point to the Internet
for a significant number of users. Examples are search engines, directories,
built-in default browser or service provider homepages, sites hardwired to browser
buttons, sites offering free homepages, e-mail or personalised news and any popular
(or heavily advertised) sites that significant numbers of people may bookmark
or set as default pages. Positioning The process
of ordering web sites or web pages by a search engine or a directory so that the
most relevant sites appear first in the search results for a particular query.
Software such as PositionAgent, Rank This and Webposition can be used to determine how a URL
is positioned for a particular search engine when using a particular search phrase.
The GoHip Search site allows you to see positioning
information from many of the big search engines, displayed all on one page. Positioning
Technique A method of modifying a web page so that search engines (or
a particular search engine) treat the page as more relevant to a particular query
(or a set of queries).
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
Q Query A word,
a phrase or a group of words, possibly combined with other syntax used to pass
instructions to a search engine or a directory in order to locate web pages. For
details of which queries are being used, visit the Overture.com Search Inventory page. To "spy" on
queries as they're entered, look at the Metaspy page. A summary of what people actually
search for can be found at http://www.synergy-marketing.com/search.html.
A free program called Word Market will collect search terms from the search engines,
and is available at http://www.softwaresolutions.net/free.htm.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
R Ranking See
Positioning. Referrer The URL of
the web page from which a visitor came. The server's referrer log file will indicate
this. If a visitor came directly from a search engine listing, the query used
to find the page will usually be encoded in the referer URL, making it easy to
see which keywords are bringing visitors. The referer information can also be
accessed as document.referrer within JavaScript or via the HTTP_REFERER environment
variable (accessible from scripting languages). Refresh Tag See
the paragraph about HTTP_EQUIV under Meta Tag. Registration The process
of informing a search engine or directory that a new web page or web site should
be indexed. Relevancy Algorithm The method a search engine or directory
uses to match the keywords in a query with the content of each web page, so that
the web pages found can be ordered suitably in the query results. Each search
engine or directory is likely to use a different algorithm, and to change or improve
its algorithm from time to time. Re-submission Repeating the search
engine registration process one or more times for the same page or site. Under
certain circumstances, this is regarded with suspicion by the search engines,
as it could indicate that someone is experimenting with spamming techniques. The
Infoseek and Altavista search engines are particularly vulnerable to spamming
because they list sites very quickly, and are thus easy to experiment with. Both
engines de-list sites for repeated re-submission and Infoseek, for example, does
not allow more than one submission of the same page in a 24 hour period. Occasional
re-submission of changed pages is not normally a problem. Robot Any
browser program which follows hypertext links and accesses web pages but is not
directly under human control. Examples are the search engine spiders, the "harvesting" programs which extract
e-mail addresses and other data from web pages and various intelligent web searching
programs. A database of web robots is maintained by Webcrawler.
robots.txt A text file stored in the top level directory of a web site
to deny access by robots to certain pages or sub-directories of
the site. Only robots which comply with the Robots Exclusion Standard will read
and obey the commands in this file. Robots will read this file on each visit,
so that pages or areas of sites can be made public or private at any time by changing
the content of robots.txt before re-submitting to the search engines. The simple
example below attempts to prevent all robots from visiting the /secret directory: User-agent:
* Disallow: /secret For more information, please refer to the Altavista robots.txt page.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
S Scooter The
name of the Altavista search engine's spider. Search Engine A server or
a collection of servers dedicated to indexing internet web pages, storing the
results and returning lists of pages which match particular queries. The indexes
are normally generated using spiders. Some of the major search engines are Altavista, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos, Northern Light and Webcrawler. Note that Yahoo is a directory, not a search engine. The term Search
Engine is also often used to describe both directories and search engines. Searchking
A smaller search engine which allows visitors to vote on the relevance
of the pages returned by their queries, thus ranking sites based on the opinions
of searchers. Unlike some of the major search engines, there is good customer
support. http://www.searchking.com/.
Search Term See Query. Server A computer, program
or process which responds to requests for information from a client. On the Internet,
all web pages are held on servers. This includes those parts of the search engines
and directories which are accessible from the Internet. Sidewinder The
name of the Infoseek search engine's spider. Siphoning The use of various
means to steal another site's traffic. Techniques used include the wholesale copying
of web pages (with the copied page altered slightly to direct visitors to a different
site, and then registered with the search engines) and the use of keywords or
keyword phrases "belonging" to other organisations, companies or web sites. Site
Hit See hit. Skewing Artificially changing
search engine results so that, for example, popular queries will return artificially
created listings. Infoseek is currently experimenting with this technique, using
a small group of reviewers to artificially force higher relevance for certain
sites. Slurp The name of the spider used by Inktomi. Snap! A large directory. The URL is http://www.snap.com/. Sniffer
The name of the filter program used by the Infoseek search engine to prevent
spamdexing. It detects multiple mirror pages, font and background spoofs, multiple
title tags, keyword stuffing and possibly other types of spamdexing. Spamdexing
The alteration or creation of a document with intent to deceive an electronic
catalogue or filing system. Any technique that increases the potential position
of a site at the expense of the quality of the search engine's database can also
be regarded as spamdexing - also known as spamming or spoofing. Spamming
See spamdexing. Spamming is also used more generally
to refer to the sending of unsolicited bulk electronic mail, and the search engine
use is derived from this term. Spider, Spyder That part of a search
engine which surfs the web, storing the URLs and indexing the keywords and text
of each page it finds. Please refer to the Search Engine Watch SpiderSpotting Chart for details of individual
spiders. See also Robot. Spidering The process of
surfing the web, storing URLs and indexing keywords, links and text. Typically,
even the largest search engines cannot spider all of the pages on the net. This
is due to the huge amount of data available, the speed at which the new data appears,
the use of politeness windows and practical limits on the
number of pages that can be visited in a given time . The search engines have
to make compromises in order to visit as many sites as possible, and they do this
in different ways. For example, some only index the home pages of each site, some
only visit sites they're explicitly told about, and some make judgements about
the importance of sites (from number and quality of inbound links) before "digging
deeper" into the subpages of a site. Spoofing See spamdexing. SSI Server Side Includes.
Used (for example) to add dynamically generated content to a web page. Stemming
A function of some search engines and directories which allows results
to be returned from some or all keywords based on the same stem as the keyword
entered as a search term. For example, when stemming is switched on, a search
for the word dance will return matches for any word whose stem is danc-, matching
the keywords dance, dancer and dancing. Stop Word A word which is
ignored in a query because the word is so commonly used that it makes no contribution
to relevancy. Examples are common net words such as computer and web, and general
words like get, I, me, the and you.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
T Title The
text contained between the start and end HTML tags of the same name. This text
is associated with (but not displayed in) the web page containing these tags,
and is displayed in a special position (usually at the top of the window) by the
web browser. Title text is important because it normally forms the link to
the page from the search engine listings, and because the search engines pay special
attention to the title text when indexing the page. Don't confuse this text
with heading text within the web page which often looks like the title. Usually
this will be rendered either using the HTML heading tags or just rendered with
a large font size. Traffic The visitors to a web page or web site.
Also refers to the number of visitors, hits, accesses etc. over a given period.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
U Unique Visitor
A real visitor to a web site. Web servers record the IP addresses of each
visitor, and this is used to determine the number of real people who have visited
a web site. If for example, someone visits twenty pages within a web site,
the server will count only one unique visitor (because the page accesses are all
associated with the same IP address) but twenty page accesses. See also hit and page view. URL Universal Resource
Locator. An address which can specify any Internet resource uniquely. The beginning
of the address indicates the type of resource - e.g. http: for web pages, ftp:
for file transfers, telnet: for computer login sessions or mailto: for e-mail
addresses. URL Submission See registration.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
V Virtual Domain A
domain hosted by a virtual server account. Virtual Server An
account on a hosting company server, usually linked to its own domain. This provides
an inexpensive way to run a web site with its own top level domain, and is usually
indistinguishable from having a separate physical server, except that the virtual
server may share an IP address with other virtual servers on the same machine.
A virtual server account is fine for most uses, but will often be slower to respond
than a physically separate server, and physical access to the machine will seldom
be allowed. The cost of a virtual server account is a small fraction of that needed
to run a real server, mainly because of the expense of the dedicated line needed
to connect the server continuously to the rest of the net. W Web
Copywriting The writing of text especially for a web page. Similar to
the writing of copy for any other type of publication, good web copywriting can
have a great effect on search engine positioning, so it forms a major part of
optimisation. Webcrawler One of the largest search engines. The
URL is http://www.webcrawler.com/.
A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y X XML
Extensible Markup Language. A new language which promises more efficient
data delivery over the web. XML does nothing itself - it must be implemented using
'parser' software or XSL. XSL Extensible Scripting Language
- an XML style sheet language supported by the newer
web browsers Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape 5. Y Yahoo
Similar to a search engine, but with a database generated by hand, this
is the world's most used directory of web sites. The main URL is http://www.yahoo.com/. It is
notoriously difficult to get listed in Yahoo and, once listed, even more difficult
to get your listing changed or to get out! To increase the odds of getting listed,
try the following: - Select the three categories you want to be listed
in very carefully. Consider the regional categories. Ensure that the categories
match the content of your site.
- Apply to one of their local subsidiaries for
your own country or city.
- Make sure that your site is well-designed and easy
to navigate.
- Ensure your site has no dead links.
- Ensure that your pages
download quickly.
- Provide good contact information on your site.
If
you manage to get listed, keep the e-mail they send you. You can e-mail the same
person subsequently to get your listing changed. |