The big search engines we focus our SEO efforts on include: Google, Yahoo, The Open Directory Project, Teoma/Ask Jeeves, and MSN.


Search Engines love links because it tells them how popular a particular site is. The more incoming links you have to your site, the more popular your web site appears. Google weighs link popularity highly in it's algorithm, and rates pages with a PageRank score of 0-10. The more incoming relevant links you have on your site, the higher PageRank your site will be. It's important to note that you should also seek to get links from unrelated web sites as well, either from business colleagues, friends, family, etc. Although they don't necessarily hold the same weight as related links, search engines still count them as being a "vote" for your site.

What's the difference between a Search Engine and a Search Directory?
Directories are a categorized collection of information about web sites, rather than the actual web pages, which is what search engines index. Search engines find web sites by sending out spiders or robots (little miniature programs) for the purpose of "crawling" the internet to find new sites to index. Search directories find their sites through manual submission that are staffed by humans who examine every site submitted to make sure that the site is actually what it claims to be, and that it belongs in the category requested. Listing with search directories are important because they increase your link popularity and PageRank. They also act as "feeders" for search engines, two examples being, Yahoo Directory and Open Directory.


Building an effective linking campaign is a tedious process that in order to be effective needs to be implemented over time. Search directories are suspicious of links that suddenly appear all at once.