 
 Database Journal: The Knowledge Center for Database Professionals
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Search Engines: The Definitive GuideBy Alex Housley Search engines are the most popular way of navigating the net. Millions of web surfers visit them every day to find web sites and other information. This makes them the fastest and easiest way to get your site recognized. To fully harness the power of the search engine you must first know how they work. All search engines work in different ways. Most use special software (robots and spiders) that visits sites, follows hyperlinks and collects important information as it goes. The information gained is added to a central database which is used to process your request. When a user submits a request the search engine looks through this database and you receive a list of web sites is order of relevance to the keywords you entered. Web directories such as Yahoo! work on a completely different concept. You often have to submit your site and keywords to each specific directory for review. If the reviewer thinks your site's content is useful and of good quality, it will be categorized within the directory. This process takes longer but the directory user has the benefit of searching knowing the returned sites are of reasonable quality. Web Directories let you browse through categories instead of searching for keywords. The leading search engines such as Altavista have millions of web sites in their database, so there is no guarantee that your site will come out top of the list for the keywords you desire. With the tips on this site you should be able to get your site in with the top few. Title TagsOne of the first things a search engine looks for is descriptive keywords in the <TITLE> tag. Instead of simply adding the page title to the <TITLE> tag it would be a good idea to add a short description next to it, including some of the most important keywords that relate to your site.For example, Brush Art could include this description to cover keywords such as paint and artistic: <TITLE>Brush Art - Paint, brush and paper resource for all your artistic needs.</TITLE>
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