Ten Steps to Search Engine Success Step 2 Understand Search Engines and Directories Search engines and directories are the two major types of Internet search services. It's important to understand the simple but fundamental difference between the two. Directories are assembled by people. When you submit your site, a person actually looks at it and decides whether to include a link to it or not. Search engine software, not a person, decides whether to include your page or not.
Lets look at the difference between search engines and directories in more detail.
How Search Engines Work Search engines are similar to telephone white pages, which contain simple lists of names and phone numbers. Search engine databases contain full-text copies of Web pages, and a massive index of these pages. When you search an index, you're trying to coax it to find a good match between the keywords you type in and all of the words contained in the index. In essence, you're relying on a computer to do simple pattern-matching between your query words and the words in the index. This means it's very important that you optimize your pages so that it's easy for the search engine to match your page with your preferred keywords.