1. Crawler Based Search Engines
2. Meta Search Engines
3. Human Powered Search Engines
4. Pay for Performance Search Engines

Crawler Based Search Engines

Examples: Google.com, Yahoo.com, Msn.com

Exactly what the word says, they crawl the web using what they call robots or spiders. They continually follow links from websites to other websites and then again links to other websites… When they visit a website they look for all the on-site links and saves it into an Index.

When a search is done using that search engine your pages that was indexed will be displayed in the search. The position/ranking of your pages is determined by a lot of factors including relevance, keywords, title, description, content and backlinks (links pointing from other websites to yours).

Meta Search Engines

Examples: www.metacrawler.com, www.dogpile.com

These are search engines that gathers listings from other search engines, rather than using its own resources and tools.

Human Powered Search Engines

Examples: Dmoz.org, www.sabest.co.za

These are typically directories where manual submitting is applied. You as the webmaster needs to select a category and enter all your website’s information manually. In most cases the directory editors validate and review websites before accepting, so in this case it does matter how professional and resources full your website is.

These directories is important for your pagerank and to get indexed when you start up a website. Crawler based engines such as Google.com regularly index these human powered directories and you need to get found.

Pay for Performance Search Engines

Examples: Google.com, Yahoo.com, Msn.com

This is typically a PPC (pay per click) module that is merged with most search engines. You can easily rank higher than your competitors without doing any Search Engine Optimization by paying a per click or flat fee.

For you as a website owner your main focus must be to get high ranking in crawler based sites. Why?

Cause the most users use them and it’s totally free!

Related posts:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) vs Pay per Click (PPC)
2. The power of the “ANCHOR TEXT”