A URL (Uniform Record Locator) is the common address of a web page, such as http://www.vikingwaters.com. The URL is the "friendly version of a website address. Special web sites called "Name Registrars” translate the URL into an IP address which is the actual address of the website and looks like this: “http://216.98.153.31”

Getting more respect for your web site. How to improve your search engine placement

How to Use a Search Engine

Since Google is the 800 pound gorilla of the search engine world, we'll concentrate on their interface. However, most of what we learn here can be used on just about any search engine.

Search engines are about words and phrases. If you enter a word, such as pickle, the search engine will return all web site pages that it is aware of that contain the word “pickle” somewhere in the text on the page. You'll get sites selling dill pickles, sites with pickle recipes, sites on how to pickle metals to clean them, sites with “picklepuss” somewhere in the text, and sites that are full of disjointed words put there by someone who just wants traffic to his/her site. With the better search engines, sites with a higher occurrence of “pickle” on the site will be presented first. Note that “pickle” does not have to be a standalone word to be a “hit”. It can be part of a word such as “pickles” (this is good if you want to look for the singular and plural of the word), however it can be part of a word such as the aforementioned“picklepuss”.

Google and other sites work hard to provide you with the best results they can. Some webmasters do their best to fool the search engines into presenting their site first, even though you won't buy anything from them because they don't really have what you're looking for.

When you're overwhelmed by too many hits from a simple search and most of them bear no resemblance to what you are looking for, it's time to get more specific. For instance, you can enter dill pickle recipe and you'll get sites with “dill”, “pickle”, and “recipe” (or “recipes”) somewhere on the page, but not necessarily near each other.

Another way to get more specific is to enclose your search words within quotes such as “dill pickle recipe”. With most search engines, you'll get sites with those words right next to each other, including “dill pickle recipes” (plural), hopefully what you're looking for.

Evaluating your results:

Most search engines will return a hot link to the particular page on each website that pops up in the search. Each listing will include the name of the page and some text that surrounded the key words you specified or the page description the site owner included in his meta tags (hidden descriptions that don't show on the page) . They will also return some paid ads for sites that are willing to pay the search engine to entice you to their site. This is how the search engines make their money. Some few search engines only include paid submissions. The legitimate search sites will indicate in some manner that the listing is paid for. Google returns two paid ads at the top of each page and several down the right side of the page. The rest are chosen from the general population.

You can click on the paid ads if you wish. However, this writer has found that the listings in the general population is usually more relevant to my search. This is because the paid listings are based on only one or two of the “keywords” in your search. For instance, if you are looking for a low-voltage outdoor lighting transformer with a light sensor to turn it on a dusk and off at dawn, you will see ads for outfits selling indoor “lighting”, “transformers”, and “light sensors”. However, the general listings will come closer. Occasionally, the paid ads have something of interest.

Refining your search:

In Google, you can search within the results you already have. For instance, if you originally searched for “pickle recipe” and you're overwhelmed with recipes for sweet pickles, you can go down to the bottom of the page and click on "search within results". Google will show you another box into which you can enter dill which should return only the pages that have “dill” on the page (hopefully for making dill pickles).

Boolean searches:

I'll admit it. I've gotten spoiled by Google. They have an advanced search page at http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en (this is the English version) that makes it much too easy. You can enter any combination of required words, required phrases, optional words, and words you don't want to see. You can choose to see pages that are only in a particular language (such as English or Spanish), pages updated recently, where on the site the words occur (title, text, the URL itself), and you can restrict the search to a particular website or exclude a web site. Google also has a safe search option that will exclude most sites devoted to so-called “adult” content.

Many search engines have advanced search pages that compete with Google's.

However, if you are not using a search engine that has an advanced search page or doesn't have one that does what you want, you can do some of these things yourself (assuming the site's search engine supports boolean logic).

The second search we tried, dill pickle recipe, is more properly written dill AND pickle AND recipe or it can be written dill + pickle + recipe. The “AND” is a boolean command.

Other boolean commands are OR, NOT, and NEAR. An easy way to learn these commands is to fill out an advance search form then see what command the engine uses (usually shown at the top of the search result).