Difference between Search Engine and Web Directory

Web directory and search engine are two different search services available to the web community. One of the main difference between search engine and Web directory is that Web directories build up their indices through human editors; whereas search engines have indices that are built up by crawlers or robots. Many directories and search engines contain both a human generated index and a computer-generated index, and are referred to as hybrids.


In search engines, the robots/ spiders or crawlers have several duties such as to read and locate web pages and report its findings back to the search engine’s databases or indices. When people use keywords to search engine to locate websites, they are searching the search engine’s index. Another common distinction is that search engines will list web pages whereas directories list websites (homepage or root directory of a site).

Search Engine Submission Tips
When listing your website with search engine, it’s better to do the job manually and read each search engines submission rules or instructions, all major search engines tell us in their guidelines that we should submit manually. Submitting your website more than once might slow down indexing time.

Don’t try to trick search engines by putting keyphrases in text that is the same colour as your background, putting them in comments, and so on. They will ban you for that.

Create relevant meta tags, all the pages in your website must contain relevant keywords, description and title. The keywords should be repeated in the content, especially in the first paragraph, in the heading and in the image alt tags (some search engines index the alt tags). You can create doorway pages (keyword specific pages) for your most important keywords to be used as a doorway to your site.

Don’t put special symbols in your URL such as “&, ?, $, %, =”. Those symbols are not recognized by search engines. Changing the URL of your pages, changing file extension or renaming files after submission also strongly not recommended.

| Directory Submission Tips |