One of the hardest parts of web site promotion is knowing where the Search Engines get their result. Most people probably think that all the results come from the Search Engine's own index. Sorry I wish it was as easy as that but Search Engines have many relationships and they have more divorces and partners than Joan Collins.

To tackle the search engines correctly you have to understand these relationships and keep up-to-date with the changes. Every search engine uses the partnerships in different ways and many have more than one. You will find the partnership results are used for main results, secondary results, sponsored results etc.

We will base this article on five of the major Search Engines and Directories Yahoo, Google, MSN, Lycos and AltaVista. You will see by just using these examples you will start to build a picture of the main players in the industry and you might even find out about a few you have never heard off.

Yahoo is arguably the main directory on the Internet and is a must to be on to attract traffic to your web site; it has two partners for its results. Firstly the main results are from the Yahoo directory itself, but Yahoo has recently teamed up with paid placement companies who are displaying results at the top of Yahoo, these companies are Espotting in Europe and Overture in the US.

As a directory it's search algorithm is partly based around the titles and description text within its index, so often obscure keywords display nothing. To stop this however , Yahoo uses Google as backup. You will know if you are looking at Google results, as you will see the Google logo on that page and it comes under the web pages category.

MSN also claims to be the biggest but we are not going to get involved in this argument. What we will say is it is also very important to be listed on MSN. The bad news is that MSN is a bit more confusing: it is split into 5 categories and the results appear in this order:

1. Featured Sites are Web sites that own the particular Keyword otherwise known as a Realnames e.g. if you type just Panasonic into the url bar it will take you to the Panasonic web site and that web site will also appear top of MSN's search engine for that keyword Panasonic. Also in this section you will see major MSN sponsored web sites.

2. Sponsored Sites is paid placement from Overture. MSN display the 3 top placed sites within Overture and the next 3 on the next page and so on. Paid placement is effective, but can be very expensive if not managed the correct way.

3. The Web directory is results from Looksmart UK (if you are on MSN.co.uk); they supply
MSN with web sites that have paid to get on the Looksmart.co.uk network.

4. The Web directory (US) is results from Looksmart US they supply MSN with web sites that have paid to get on the Looksmart.com network.

5. Web Pages is the final piece of MSN, these are supplied by an index called Inktomi who supply a number of Search Engines with their Search Engine technology.

Google is an excellent Search Engine, very detailed but very hard to get good results on. It only has the one relationship and that is for its directory results. These are supplied by a company called The Open Directory Project (dmoz.org). Dmoz is a free directory that works similarly to Yahoo. It supplies quite a few Search Engines, so it is well worth applying for a listing.

Lycos is another directory that uses its own data for the main results but has backup from other suppliers. Espotting is one of them, as you know by now it is a paid placement supplier. It supplies the top 2 and bottom 3 on page 1 of a search on Lycos. Within Lycos you have a category links section, which is supplied by The Open Directory Project (dmoz.org). The final section of Lycos is web results that back-up the Lycos results with FAST who are a crawler-based index.

AltaVista is last on the cards. By now you will have met the companies that AltaVista use to backup their own results. Above and below the main listings in AltaVista you will find featured sites, which are paid placement sites through Overture. The top section shows the top 2 in Overture and the bottom section shows the next 3 on Overture. AltaVista also contains a directory section; Looksmart supplies these results.

That's it! I know it is confusing but to achieve successful positions on the Search Engines you have to know them inside out and relationships are a major factor in your web site's promotion. If you have any more questions please contact Gary from iwanthits on 01355 230099 or email gary@conceptmgt.com.