The term "human powered" mainly refers to directories, i.e. online catalogs which categorize Web sites into thematic sections. Yahoo!, along with the regular Web search, offers one of the most complete catalogs on the Web.

When you submit a site to a directory, it is queued for editorial review. Usually, when you submit, you are allowed to choose the category your site will be placed under, as well as to enter the desired description and title for your site, which will show in the related category. However, the actual presence of your site is subject to the editor's decision when he or she browses your site.

Directories DO NOT accept automated submissions and have special means to protect themselves from auto-submission software. You should always submit manually to a directory.

Inktomi (http://www.inktomi.com)

Inktomi Corporation is a technology company with one of its main components being the Inktomi search engine. Inktomi licensed its search engine out to other companies, such as HotBot, that wanted their own search engine without having to build one from scratch. Yahoo! purchased the Inktomi search engine in 2003. Since then, Inktomi's own crawler is no longer crawling the Web; instead, it has transformed into the Yahoo's crawler.

SEO in a nutshell: get quality links to your site; the higher the pagerank, the better.

The problem is that if you submit your site to a high pagerank directory or search engine, it can take months for your site to appear. Moreover, many high PR directories and search engines charge big bucks for the privilege of getting listed with them. For example, the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) directory takes several months or more to list a site. And Yahoo charges $299 per year for a commercial site to be listed in their directory.

On-the-page factors considered by Google

Now that we've examinded the off-the-page factors that have primary importance for Google, let's now take a look into on-the-page factors that you should page attention to before submitting to Google.

There are certain reasons to believe Google still considers the META keyword tag for counting relevancy. While your META description tag contents can be used by Google as the description of your site in the search results, the META description does not have any influence for relevancy count.

The Integrated Approach in SEM puts the optimization cycle first among the site management tasks. Only after you create and position quality Web copy will you then be able to pay attention to visitor analysis and technical maintenance.

In this course, we will refer to the aggregate of the optimization tasks as the "Promotion cycle". The current stage of our course is wholly devoted to taking you through these tasks step by step.

Search Engine Optimization is a part of Search Engine Marketing that aims at getting maximum quality traffic with the help of your organic search engine listings. Here's the definition we're most attached to:

Search Engine Optimization is the use of search engines to draw traffic to a web site. It is the technique of attaining a higher ranking in search engines and directories via changes to a site to make it more search engine compatible.

Often, the term "search engine" is misused to describe both directories and pure search engines. In fact, they are not the same thing; the difference lies in the way result listings are generated.

In fact, there are four major kinds of search engines you should know about. These are:

• crawler-based (traditional, common) engines;
• directories (mostly human-edited catalogs);
• hybrid engines ( META engines and those using other engines' results);
• pay-per-performance and paid inclusion engines.