SEO experts dedicate much of their time doing their search engine optimization  for Google and, to a degree,  one or two of the other main search engines. There is not anything against it and it is very  logical, believing that being at the top of  Google’s SERP  is the lion’s share in Web popularity but quite often, no matter how you proceed, being toward the top of Google does not happen. Or sometimes, the price you need to pay (not only literally, but in terms of effort and time) to be at the top of Google SERP’s and stay there is too high. Perhaps we should state here the biggest SEO horror - being banned by Google, in which you simply cannot  use Google and no matter whether you like it or not, you have  to have a look at other possible alternatives.

What are Google Alternatives?

The first alternative to Google is quite obvious - optimize for the remaining main search engines, if you have not done so already. Yahoo! and MSN can bring you enough new visitors, although sometimes it is virtually impossible to optimize for the three of them at the same time because of the differences in their spider algorithms. You could also optimize your website for (or at least submit to) some of the other search engines (Lycos, Excite, Netscape, etc.) but keeping in mind that they barely have over 3-5% of the Web search traffic, so do not expect much.  They may not provide much value to SEO

Another alternative to increase your SEO results is to submit to search directories (often known as Web Directories) and/or specialized search engines.  Submitting to the optimal directories might prove better than optimizing for Live (MSN), for example. Specialized search engines and portals have the advantage that the audience they attract often consists of people who are interested in a particular topic and if this is your topic, you can get to your target audience directly. It is true that specialized search engines will not bring you nearly as many visitors, as if you were at the top of Google SERP’s, but the quality of these website visitors will be extremely high.

We cannot forget other SEO options like posting to blogs and forums or paid advertisements.

Web Directories
What is a Web Directory?

Web directories (or as they are sometimes known - search directories) existed before the search engines, especially Google, became popular. As the name implies, web directories are simply directories in which different resources are gathered. An example of this would be Yahoo in its early days, although Yahoo and Google both have their own directories.  Another would be the DMOZ, although it can be quite a challenge getting listed.  Web directories are just huge collections of links to web sites, arranged into different categories. The web sites in a Web directory are listed in some specific order (most often alphabetically) and users browse through the categories.  Some are based upon a bid process or for paying for featured listings for a period of time.  Although many Web directories offer a way to search , search directories are fundamentally different from general search engines in the two specific ways - most directories are edited by humans and URLs are not gathered automatically by spiders but submitted by the site webmasters. The main advantage of Web directories is that no matter how smart spiders may  become, when there is a human toreview and check the websites, and there is less of a chance that pages will be listed in the wrong categories. The problems with the first difference are that the listings in web directories are sometimes out of date, if no person was available to do the editing and checking for some time and that sometimes you may have to wait as long as a half a year before being listed in a search directory.

The second difference - there are often no spiders - meaning that you must go and submit your URL to the search directory, rather than wait for the spider to come to your site. Fortunately, this is done only once for each directory, so it is not that bad.  Also, there are programs and tools to automate the entering of data into the forms on these web directories.

Once you are included in a particular directory, in most cases you can stay there as long as you wish to and wait for people (and search engines) to find you. The fact that a link to your site appears in a respectable Web directory is good because first, it is a backlink and second, you increase your visibility for spiders, which in turn raises your chance to be indexed by them.

Examples of Web Directories

There are hundreds and thousands of search directories but undoubtedly the most popular one is DMOZ. It is a general purpose search directory and it accepts links to all kinds of sites.  The Best of the Web is one of the oldest Web directories around and it still keeps to high standards in selecting sites.  There is a fee to being listed in many of these well established web directories.

Specialized Search Engines

What is a Specialized Search Engine?

Specialized search engines are another  tool to include in your SEO tool bag. Unlike genera search engines, specialized search engines index the pages for specific  topics only and very often there are many, many pages that cannot be found in the genera search engines but only in the specialized ones. Some of the specialized search engines are huge sites that actually host the resources they link to, or used to be search directories but have evolved to include links not only to sites that were submitted to them. There are many specialized search engines for practically every  topic and it is always good to be aware of the various specialized search engines for your genre.