Before You Build Your Site

One of the most common misconceptions about SEO is that it should be implemented after a web

site has been built. It can be, but it’s much harder. A better option is to consider SEO even before

you begin to build your web site, if that’s at all possible. It may not be. But if that’s the case, you

can still implement SEO strategies in the design of your site; it will just require a lot more work

than building it in at the beginning.

Know your target

Before you even start contemplating how to build your web site, you should know in what types

of search engines it’s most important for your site to be ranked. Search engines are divided into

several types, beyond the primary, secondary, and targeted search engines that you learned about

in Chapter 2. In addition, search engine types are determined by how information is entered into

the index or catalog that’s used to return search results. The three types of search engines are:

Crawler-based engines: To this point, the search engines discussed fall largely into this

category. A crawler-based search engine (like Google) uses an automated software agent

(called a crawler) to visit, read, and index web sites. All the information collected by the

crawler is returned to a central repository. This is called indexing. It is from this index

that search engine results are pulled. Crawler-based search engines revisit web pages

periodically in a time frame determined by the search engine administrator.

_Human-powered engines: Human-powered search engines rely on people to submit

the information that is indexed and later returned as search results. Sometimes, humanpowered

search engines are called directories. Yahoo! is a good example of what, at one

time, was a human-powered search engine. Yahoo! started as a favorites list belonging to

two people who needed an easier way to share their favorite web site. Over time, Yahoo!

took on a life of its own. It’s no longer completely human-controlled. A newer search

engine called Mahalo (www.mahalo.com) is entirely human-powered, however, and it’s

creating a buzz on the Web.

 Hybrid engine: A hybrid search engine is not entirely populated by a web crawler, nor

entirely by human submission. A hybrid is a combination of the two. In a hybrid engine,

people can manually submit their web sites for inclusion in search results, but there is also

a web crawler that monitors the Web for sites to include. Most search engines today fall

into the hybrid category to at least some degree. Although many are mostly populated by

crawlers, others have some method by which people can enter their web site information.

It’s important to understand these distinctions, because how your site ends up indexed by a search

engine may have some bearing on when it’s indexed. For example, fully automated search engines

that use web crawlers might index your site weeks (or even months) before a human-powered search

engine. The reason is simple. The web crawler is an automated application. The human-powered

search engine may actually require that all entries be reviewed for accuracy before a site is included

in search results.

Jerri L. Ledford