RE: Search Engine Indexing

Search Engine Indexing

Search engine indexing collects, parses, and stores data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, physics, and computer science.  An alternate name for the process in the context of search engines designed to find web pages on the Internet is web indexing.

Popular engines focus on the full-text indexing of online, natural language documents.  Media types such as video and audio and graphics are also searchable.

Meta search engines reuse the indices of other services and do not store a local index, whereas cache-based search engines permanently store the index along with the corpus.  Unlike full-text indices, partial-text services restrict the depth indexed to reduce index size.  Larger services typically perform indexing at a predetermined time interval due to the required time and processing costs, while agent-based search engines index in real time.          -- Wikipedia.

If no one knows that your website is out there in the ether some where, no one will be able to magically search for it to be there.  It's lonely out in the ethersphere.  This is where the power of the search engines come into play.

Let's say that only 10 companies in the world sell "glasfooblers".  If you're one of those companies and have developed a website that says that you have glasfooblers for sale, but the search engines don't yet know that fact -- then no one will find your company when they do a "glasfooblers" search on the Internet.  If you are one of three companies, out of 10, that have a website -- and the other two websites are indexed in the search engines, who do you think is going to get all of the sales ?  Obviously, there are 2 companies out of 10 that are getting the bulk of the glasfooblers business in this information age.

One needs to inform the search engines of their website's presence.

Get Verified and Indexed

But by who ?  Read what comScore has to say.

Google

Google is currently by far, the largest, most dominant, web search engine in existence.  Google indexes billions of web pages, so that users can search for the information they desire, through the use of keywords and operators.  Any website MUST be formally indexed into Google if one desires it to become fully successful.  This is a no brainer.

Bing / Yahoo!

Bing is the web search engine run by Microsoft, which was formerly known as Live Search, Windows Live Search and MSN Search.  On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search.  So in order to be indexed for Microsoft & Yahoo!, it's a one stop shop over to Bing.  Another no brainer.

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Becoming indexed with Google and Bing, a website now has around 96 % of the possible searches covered.  Easy enough.

Alexa

Why Alexa you ask ?  Never heard of them.  They weren't listed by comScore at all.

Have you also noticed that we haven't said a word about getting "verified", yet ?

In order to get indexed into a search engine, they will first make you prove that you are the owner or administrator of your particular website.  They will verify your website rights before asking them for the indexing service they provide.  This is conducted by the use of a verification "key", a string of letters and numbers, a long password if you will, that you have to put into your website's back end computer code.  When the search engine finds your coded key, it has verified your website, and you can then get them to index your website into their system.

Joomla! has an extension called Google Site Verification, that makes it easy to insert the verification keys provided by Google, Bing & Alexa, into your website, with out your having to know how to "code" these keys in your website's back end.

So therefore -- why not Alexa also ?  It's easy.

Plus, Alexa provides traffic data, global rankings and other information on thousands of websites.  They have a directory that can allow your consumers to interact with your business.  These features can be viewed just to the left of this article.  Remember that as of December 2012, there were 634 million websites in the world -- so our statistics aren't to bad.

A little bit of a twist on the pure search engine offerings that is very easily obtained by using the extension above.

Others

Ask, AOL and scores of other search engines.  Submit to them also, if you are awash with time and desire to be thorough.  Although, one does have to ask oneself, if chasing the other 4 % of the search traffic, is time well spent ?

Oh yeah.  Did we point out that all of the above services are free ?  All it costs is the time to -- just do it !

This RE: website is indexed into Google, Bing / Yahoo, Alexa & Ask.  That covers about 98.5 % of all searches.  Close enough for us.

      Step Eight --Directory Submissions

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