Search Engines vs. Directories

From: Alex Tillman <alex_at_webtillman.com>
Date: Thu 31 Jan 2002 10:21:22 -0500

Just wanted to comment on the "which Search engine is
better?" question we seem to be migrating towards.

Marco Janeczek said - "The best results that we have
received are from Google.ca which has given the firm a
much higher traffic than from overture or Looksmart. I
might be wrong because Overture does not actually have
the capability of targeting different countries,
meanwhile google.ca has."

I know Overture is limited internationally (they just
added Germany I think), but you need to consider the
difference between directories and search engines.

Directories (like Yahoo) have categories and place
your site within the appropriate one. Most
importantly, there is a fixed description (maybe 25
words or so) that accompanies your site as a
description. (Often this description is written, or
at least heavily edited, by the directory itself,
regardless of what you submit). The combination of
words that are in your description and your site
title, are what will determine how a user to that
search service can find you in a search. So if you get
lucky, and your description contains a lot of
good/unique keywords in it, you'll be found more
often. (We had a rebate center on our site, and they
included that in our description, which let us rank
highly for "camera rebate" related searches- a great
bonus as our competitors did not get this.)If not,
you'll be much harder to find, and get less traffic
from that source.

True search engines, on the other hand, rely on
"spiders" which crawl your page independently and send
back the results. These results (weighted with a bunch
of other factors) are what determine how your site can
be found. So if you design your page about wombats,
for instance, and you have the word "wombat" appear 15
times in the text and title, and in a headline or two
in bold, also within the alt text of a picture (Google
gives a bonus for sites with descriptive alt text as a
push to make sites more accessible for the visually
impaired) of the elusive black-footed wombat, you
stand a very good chance of ranking highly for
wombats. (It's much more complicated than that, but
the idea is that content, which you control, plays a
much larger role in placement results).

Pay-per-listing services (like Overture) at least let
you control where the site ranks, and under which
keywords. The downside, of course, is that a)you have
to pay for it and b) some more web savvy surfers are
conditioned to ignore "sponsored listings" since they
are not objectively making their way to the top.

So, the point of all that is that, if your site is
properly designed, more often than not one would
expect to get more traffic from a search engine (like
Google) than from a directory (like Yahoo) simply
because more keywords (and therefore more searches)
will be likely to show up, and you aren't confined to
the words that some editor chooses for you. However,
if you get lucky and get a great description for your
site in a directory (especially one that is unique),
you could see phenomenal traffic from a directory.

Bottom line- I'm not saying one is any better than the
other, and a good SEO strategy needs to try and get
good placement in directories and search engines. (Pay
per click is an effective option for some as well.)
Just thought we should compare apples to apples here
when saying one works and the other doesn't. Effective
placement in any of them is likely to get good,
qualified traffic.



Received on Thu Jan 31 2002 - 09:21:22 CST