Réferencing… what is it?

In the referencing area, positioning consists of putting a Web site or the pages of a Web site at the best level in the research tools results (directories, search engines) for a given word or expression.
Example: you sell shoes. Your Web site’s positioning will consist in ensuring that a page of your site appears in the first results of major search engines, the closest possible to the first position. When the Internet user types the following requests: shoe sale, luxury shoes, first price shoes, shoe purchase, etc., the goal is to appear let’s say in the first thirty results, i.e. in the first three result pages. Many search tools display ten results per page.

Directory and engice : the difference…

A DIRECTORY is a search tool that identifies a certain number of sites through detailed files generally including the title, the URL address and a brief description. Each site is registered in one or many categories (or entries). These tools can be considered as the Internet’s yellow pages.

When a keyword is entered in the form, the directory searches the finds related to this term in its site detailed files not in the content of the Web site in question. That is what mostly sets it apart from the search engines.

The most well-known directories throughout the world are:

• Yahoo! (1994, 2 million sites)
• Open Directory Project (1998, more than 3 million sites)
• Looksmart (1996, 2 million sites)
• La Toile du Québec

The SEARCH ENGINE runs on a system that is completely different from the directory. Software robots (called crawlers or spiders) scan the Web, go from page to page (from link to link) and save the content of the pages seen during their tour composing an index, i.e. a relatively large collection of Web pages. Most of the time, the worldwide engines indexes contain thousands of millions of Web pages.

The software robot reruns according to relatively frequent delays on pages that it had previously referenced to save a more recent version. We call it ‘refreshing the index’.

When an Internet user enters a keyword in the form, the engine will search for the finds, i.e. the text content of the Web pages previously saved. Once the ‘batch’ of pages containing the identified requested term is identified, the engine ranks the pages by relevance order according to an order and an algorithm (based on some sort criteria) which are specific to it.

The most well-known search engines are:

• AltaVista (1995, 550 million pages)
• Google (1998, more than 2 billion pages)
• HotBot (1996, 500 million pages)
• Lycos (1995, 625 million pages)

The search engine conducts a research on Web pages while the directory will suggest Web sites. That is the difference between directories and search engines explaining that it is impossible to compare the results provided by the two types of tools.