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Promotion Tip:
Specialty Search Engines
by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
NetMechanic, Inc.
A good Yahoo listing or high rank in Google is crucial to the success of most commercial and general interest sites. But suppose your site is devoted to a more esoteric topic, say Norse mythology or some narrow aspect of pharmaceutical research. If so, specialty search engines may deliver more targeted traffic to your site. Specialty engines rarely charge for listings and often list sites much more quickly than the major search sites.
How Specialty Search Engines Work
A specialty search engine focuses on a particular topic, geographic region, or even a particular file format. You can find engines devoted to such diverse topics as computer science research papers, graphics files, shopping sites, and medical research sites.
It's probably more accurate to call these "specific" search engines instead of "specialty" because of their narrow focus. A medical search engine won't contain information about antique furniture, but could contain a wide range of medical information on everything from ethics to research to debates on health care reform. Just how specific a specialty engine gets is up to the owner.
Some specialty search engines operate their own spiders that crawl through specific sites and index the information from those sites only. That allows searchers to enter more general search terms and quickly locate the information they want.
For instance, a pregnant woman looking for information about labor can easily find information at the TheLaborOfLove.com site by entering "labor" as the keyword. The same search on Google returns sites from the US Department of Labor, various political parties, and international labor organizations, but only one result in the top 30 is pregnancy-related.
Other specialty search engines operate more like directories than standard search engines (learn about the difference) - although most people refer to them collectively as specialty search engines. A human editor with experience in the subject reviews submitted sites before they're listed.
This means that search results from specialty engines are often of higher quality than the results from general search engines. This is especially true when you're searching on an extremely obscure or technical topic.
Use Them To Promote Your Site
Specialty search engines aren't hard to find; there are literally thousands to choose from. Your main problem may be narrowing down the choices to select the best ones. You'll have to use the manual submission process to submit to specialty engines, so research helps you use your time wisely.
These sites list a number of specialty search engines and are organized by topic:
Once you've found the most relevant specialty sites, it's time to submit your site to one or more of them. Keep these points in mind when you do:
- Submit multiple pages. Like directories, specialty sites often link just to a Web site's homepage, not individual pages within the site. If the site permits, consider submitting several of your specialized pages instead of just your home page. So if your site sells hot sauce and also contains recipes and a history of hot sauce in North America, you'd want to submit those three pages separately to the SearchHotSauce.com search site.
- Trade links with other sites. The specialty engines are a great way to quickly increase your site's link popularity score. Browse through the other sites included in the specialty engine or directory and offer to trade links with the best. This will help increase your site's rank on many of the larger search engines.
- Optimize pages. Some sites do a meta search on conventional search engines and present results that way, while other specialty sites search through specific Web sites only. In either case, your efforts at basic search engine optimization will often influence your rank on specialty engines too.
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Since the effort you put into increasing your site's appeal to search engines and directories pays off in many ways, make sure you're doing the job right. With NetMechanic's Search Engine Power Pack, you can easily write META tags, select keywords, optimize your pages for specific search engines, submit your site, and track your rank.
Specialty search engines obviously attract less visitors than larger engines, but the traffic they do generate is often more targeted than traffic from a general engine. Give the specialty engines a try. They're a free and easy way to attract new visitors.
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