Which Search Engines and Directories are Important?

Currently, there are only three major players: Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. They are responsible for the bigger part of the search engine traffic you can get because they also power other search engines, for example the search engine on AOL.com displays Google results.

Then there are search engines that are not so popular but they can bring you some additional visitors, for example Ask Jeeves and Teoma. In addition, there are country specific search engines. If you have a German web site, you should also submit to the popular German search engines, for instance Fireball.de.

Directories are different from search engines because all web site submissions are reviewed by humans. There are several directories where your web site should be listed. The most important one is The Open Directory Project at www.dmoz.org.

You should also submit to topic specific search engines. If your web site sells garden equipment, you should submit your web site to specific garden directories. Even if they don’t send you some visitors, they could improve the link popularity of your web site which helps to improve your ranking in other search engines.

You can refer to search engines directory to get more details about search engines and web directories. In the search engine finder, you can find a list of all important search engines and directories. It also lists country specific search engines and special interest directories.