Search Engine and Directory - what is the Difference?
! It is important before you start to promote your website that you appreciate the difference between a Search Engine and a Directory, as this will help you understand what helps to improve your rankings on a Search Engine that might not work with a Directory and vice versa.
What is a Search Engine?
Search engines, such as Google, use indexing software programs mostly called spiders or robots to ‘crawl’ look over your website, to read it and try to understand what your website is all about and what it is selling or offering as information. They regularly send out their spiders / robots to crawl all sites they can see.
They will record the text on your web page and make note of the key words and titles of your pages and page descriptions for its index.
After it has looked at all your pages it can access, it will then look at all external links to your site both inbound and outbound, and evaluate the relevancy and importance of those links, which goes towards their sophisticated web scoring system known as Algorithm.
The number of times the spiders / robots will return to review your site will depend upon a number of factors, but one basic factor is the frequency of when you actually update your website with new information. So, the more often you add fresh content and make changes to your site the higher the frequency the spiders will return to update their review of your website. A good example would be a news website such as www.cnn.com or
www.bbc.co.uk Where news is updated
hourly, the search engine spiders will review these sites many times in
a day.
Search engines rank your website based upon very complicated mathematical formulas knows as Algorithm.
What is an Internet Directory?
Unlike Search Engines, Directories don’t use automated software to review your website. Instead they used good old fashioned human beings to actually review your website manually, who trawl through your website to determine its suitability for inclusion in their directory and its potential ranking.
You still have to submit your website to a directory, which is segregated into categories. It is your responsibility to ensure you choose the most appropriate category as, if you do not, then it is most likely the reviewer will simply delete your submission and reject its inclusion, as they simply don’t have the time to help you choose the right category with thousands of submissions made daily.
Some directories will delete your website from its database after 4 months and some will keep it for longer and some will retain your website indefinitely. This can be found in the directory rules and is the main reason why it is necessary to regularly submit your website to the same directory according to their rules.
There are thousands of directories which are product or topic specific or country or even state or city specific and also language specific so you can submit your website to directories about electronics or motor cars or computing.
If you want to find out more about what search engines and directories you should submit to then complete our enquiry form
This article is copyright protected ©
White Hat Web Design have created the above article to help our web readers better understand the Internet and web applications, whilst we are happy for anyone to link back to this page, we will not accept any copying of its content or publication in any medium without written permission from White Hat Web Design.
Please link back using the URL http://www.white-hat-web-design.co.uk/articles/search-engine-or-directory.php or contact us
