The Different Types of Search Engines
Contents
Although the term “search engine” is often used indiscriminately to describe crawler-based search engines, human-powered directories, and everything in between, they are not all the same. Each type of “search engine” gathers and ranks listings in radically different ways.
Crawler-Based
Crawler-based search engines such as Google and Bing, compile their listings automatically. They “crawl” or “spider” the web and people search through their listings. These listings are what make up the search engine’s index. You can think of the index as a massive electronic filing cabinet containing a copy of every web page the spider finds. Because spiders scour the web on a regular basis, any changes you make to a website, or links to or from your own website, may affect your search engine ranking.
It is also important to remember that it may take a while for a spidered page to be added to the index, especially if there are no other sites linking to it. Until your page is in a search engine’s index, it is not available to those searching.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to making changes to a website so that it can attain higher search engine positions for specific keywords in organic results.
Organic results refer to the regular search engine results displayed by crawler-based search engines; as opposed to ads which are paid results (see below).
Directories and listings
Directories organize listings in categories, sub categories, sub-sub categories and so on. Often a directory will have a theme. For example a directory of businesses in a local area or of artists within a certain discipline. You can find directories on ANY popular topic. One way to increase your website’s authority is to seek out sites that are related to your keywords and that you think people will visit and potentially use to find your website. Webmasters create listings on directories, some of which are free and others require payment.
Pay Per Click (sponsored results)
PPC advertising is the name for the ads you see at the top of the organic results. Services such as Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising allow you to pay to show your ads on search engine results pages. How much you pay (your bid), along with the click-through rate of the ad (CTR) and the relevance of the landing page, determine the ranking of your PPC ads on the search results page.
There are companies such as Red Carpet Web Promotion that set up and manage PPC campaigns for companies that bid on many keywords (which can number in the thousands). Contact Red Carpet Web Promotion if this or other web promotion services interest you.
Next Steps
After having read this SEO Basics guide, you are ready for the Advanced SEO guide.