SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

It’s impossible to write a book on search engine positioning without a chapter on the search engines themselves. What I hope to provide for you in this chapter is a slightly different slant on the subject. The actual technical details are much less important than you’ve been led to believe – what matters most is the implications for your strategy. Therefore, instead of boring you with a set of charts describing which search engines have which features, I’ll explain what’s generally true for all search engines, as well as what significant differences you’ll encounter. Throughout, you’ll be given concrete steps to take that minimize or eliminate the need to worry about specific search engines. In the long run, market pressures ensure that search engines will converge toward each other anyway. While there are still significant differences between them in some areas, the methods you’ll learn in this book will help you stay on the right side of those differences. The "fast start" system is based on the current state of the art, but we haven't ignored the many changes that are already in the wind. The same strategies will continue to apply, regardless of any short-term changes in the industry. At the time of this writing (September 2003), Google is in a very dominant position in the search industry. With AOL and Yahoo delivering Google results, and the Google search engine itself also a popular portal, 3/4 of all searches on a given day probably originate on a portal utilizing Google's results. This is great news if you follow my system, because Google loves content-rich sites with clear structure, which is exactly what I will teach you to build. If Google goes away tomorrow (highly unlikely!), that wouldn't really force us to change our strategy.