Search Engine Optimization All-In-One For Dummies®

Chapter 2. Meeting the Search Engines

In This Chapter

• Finding common threads among the engines

• Meeting the major and minor search engines

• Finding your niche in the vertical engines

• Understanding metasearch engines

All search engines try to make their results the most relevant. They want to make you happy, because when you get what you want, you're more likely to use their site again. The more you use them, the more money they make. It's a win/win situation. So when you do your search on classic car customization and find what you're looking for right away instead of having to click through ten different pages, you'll probably come back and use the same search engine again.

In this chapter, you meet the major search engines and discover their similarities and differences, find out what makes a directory work, get familiar with the difference between organic and paid results, and how the search engines get their organic results. Plus, you find out about the search engine's paid search programs and decide if metasearch engines are important to your SEO campaign.

Finding the Common Threads among the Engines

To keep their results relevant, all search engines need to understand the main subject of a Web site. You can help the search engines find your Web site by keeping in mind the three major factors they're looking for:

• Content: Content is the meat and bones of your Web site. It's all the information your Web site contains, not just the words but also the Engagement Objects (the images, videos, ...