Search Engines & Human Edited Directories - What are the differences?

Search engines such as Google, MSN / Live Search and Yahoo! Search are amongst the most popular search engines used by people to find information, however, different search engines use different ways of ranking your web pages in their search engine results. We discuss the differences in search engines and directories below:

Crawler Based Search Engines

Crawler based search engines find their way around the internet by following links from within web pages, analysing them as it goes to determine which position your page should be displayed in the search results. Each search engine has a set of criteria that it checks on your web pages and ranks them accordingly.

Crawler based search engines cannot see your page like humans do, so pretty images, flash animations and graphics are not 'seen' when it comes to your page's search engine optimisation.

Crawler based search engines look at the code, meta descriptions, links & link text and on page content & headings that make up your page to analyse it.

Organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is mostly oriented toward the crawler based engines to make your page more search engine compatible.

Human Edited Directories

Directories such as The Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and the Yahoo! Directory are 'human-edited directories'.

Human-edited directories are different to crawler based search engines as web pages that are submitted to directories are reviewed and added by real people after evaluating the content of the submitted website. This is done mainly to prevent pages being submitted automatically which can lead to spam, false listings and other troubles.

After completing the submission process, your web pages will be queued for reviewing by a human editor.

There are ways of getting your website listed quicker in some he human edited directories such as Yahoo! Directory's paid inclusion for an annual fee.

When we optimise your website, we take into account all the factors that affect your sites search engine and directory friendliness and make sure your site is ready for both!