As a marketer you must be concerned about getting traffic from every possible source. It is a common mistake to stick to one search engine for traffic because different people have different browsing habits.

Today we will discuss the topmost search engines which can provide you with traffic.

Google

Who does not know Google? It serves as first source of information to most of us. Google is leading search engine that has left every other player far behind as for as searching and indexing is concerned. Google’s Crawler of spider is known as Googlebot.

Google has a very good algorithm of ranking pages returned from a result, probably one of the main reasons it has become so popular over the years.

As it revises its algorithms, Google is changing the way web used to function. Because of immense business potential, webmasters compete to get a good rank in Google. With change of indexing algorithm the ranking keeps changing. Any site that does not follow Google guidelines is shunned from index.

Yahoo!

Yahoo is one of the oldest web directories and portals on the Internet today. Yahoo became live in 1994.In contrast to Google Yahoo also functions as web directory and listing measures are quite tough. You need to pay a heavy fee to get your site noted for consideration but that does not promise inclusion. However if you get included rewards are quite phenomenal in terms of traffic.

AltaVista

Have scooter paid a visit to your website. Scooter used to be AltaVista’s crawling bot, but now there is a new form of scooter that crawls the web.

Altavista takes quite a long time to crawl your entire site and is very slow in comparison to Google and Yahoo.

Inktomi

Once it powered secondary search base of Yahoo. Their bot is named as “Slurp”. Inktomi provides result to number of sites including AOL, MSN, Hotbot, Looksmart, About, Goto, CNet, Geocities, NBCi, ICQ and many more.

Lycos

Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the internet after Altavista and Yahoo. Their spider is named as “T-rex”.

Lycos supports pages with Frame content. But Lycos will not index any page with smaller content. Generally the limit is 75 words

Looksmart

Looksmart differentiates between business and non business websites.

Non business websites can submit themselves to Looksmart but if your website is business related you need to pay a fee to get included which generally takes around a week.

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