Search engine news and views

What's new in the world of search engines on the Internet, and how can you get them to notice your agent website? Here are some news, views, tips and tricks.

How Big is Big?
According to comScore Media Metrix, a ratings company that measures search-specific traffic, Google with 35 percent, Yahoo with 28 percent, AOL with 16 percent, and MSN with 15 percent led the way in search portal traffic in February. Google provided results on google.com and other sites to power almost half of all searches, while Yahoo provided a little more than 45 percent of all results. Google provides results to AOL, Netscape, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, and others. Yahoo provides results to AltaVista, MSN, LookSmart, and others. You can easily see why most search engine marketing efforts are thrown at these two monster players. Microsoft has announced that MSN will have its own technology soon, but it's not expected until at least the end of the year.

Building Links
A lot of emphasis these days is placed on Google's PageRank™. This is an indication of how popular your site is, or how many links point to your site. Yahoo uses a similar "rank." This doesn't necessarily mean that you will come out on top of search results if you get a lot of sites to link to you, but it certainly helps. As Google explains it, "…Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote." Basically, a more popular site casts a larger vote.

Here's the trick we promised: Relevance is also partially based on something called "anchor text." This is the text that is part of the link. So, if a popular site links to your site inside the sentence "…a great place to find real estate in Miami," and your page has the phrase "real estate in Miami" on it, you have a good shot at a higher ranking.