Chapter 2: Meeting the Search Engines

In This Chapter

Finding common threads among the engines

Meeting the major and minor search engines

Finding your niche in the vertical engines

Understanding metasearch engines

All search engines try to make their results the most relevant. They want to make you happy, because when you get what you want, you’re more likely to use that search engine again. The more you use them, the more money they make. It’s a win/win situation. So when you do your search on classic car customization and find what you’re looking for right away instead of having to click through ten different pages, you’ll probably come back and use the same search engine again.

In this chapter, you meet the major search engines and discover their similarities and differences, find out what makes a directory work, get familiar with the difference between organic and paid results, and get a better understanding of how the search engines get their organic results. Plus, you find out about the search engines’ paid search programs and get help deciding whether metasearch engines are important to your SEO campaign.