Search Engine Registration for
Genealogy and History Websites


This comprehensive tutorial was written by Kristen K.



QUICK LINKS
WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE REGISTRATION

We've all been to sites like Google and Yahoo, searching for anything from relatives to recipes. How does a site like Google or Yahoo get all those websites to search through? Simple…. People put them there! It is true that a search engine or directory may eventually find your site over time, but with search engine registration, you are giving the search engine the kick it needs to say, "Hey! I'm here! Look at me!"

SEARCH ENGINES? DIRECTORIES? WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE?

Search Engines (Google, Altavista) and Directories (Yahoo, LookSmart) are two very different types of resources.

A true search engine such as Google indexes websites by "spidering" them. When Google is given a website URL to add to its database, it sends out its spider, "Googlebot". Googlebot comes to the URL it was given and reads the page's HTML coding. It looks for things like meta tags, text, links and other factors. Then, in a chain reaction, Googlebot then follows these links to look at other pages on the site. When Googlebot has finished reading the entire site, it carries back the information to Google's internal database. From here, web searchers can call up on the information using keywords. When a keyword is typed into the search box, Google looks through its database of indexed sites to return matches.

Directories like Yahoo do not use spiders to index sites. When a site is submitted to Yahoo's directory, a real human goes to the site to take a peek. The human editor then determines what category is best for the site. Most directories do use humans behind the scenes to index sites, and thus, it can take a while to get into a directory.

For this tutorial, all search engines and directories will be referred to as "search engines" just to shorten things up. Remember… search engines and directories are very different animals!

SO HOW DO I GET IN A SEARCH ENGINE?

The first step in search engine registration is to optimize your website- make it search engine friendly. When designing your pages, be conscious of the text on your page. Search engines love text, without it, they can't tell what the page is about. Make sure that text on your pages is not hidden in images. A good way to check for this is to pass your mouse over the text on the page- if the text gets highlighted, it is readable text to a search engine.