Features

However, there's a catch. Wildcard support is by no means universal or consistent. Google uses asterisks, not to indicate a missing portion of a word, but to indicate one or more missing words. Many other engines don't seem to support the wildcards that you might think of as fairly common. Don't worry too much about this. Many search engines are now smart enough to search on the stem of a word, removing the need for wildcards.

Search engine toolbars

It's useful to have search facilities instantly to hand. Nowadays, that's relatively simple as most current browsers have a search box built in. In the Firefox and Opera browsers, this points by default to Google.com. In Internet Explorer 7 the default search engine is, as you'd expect, MSN Search. All the browsers allow you to change the default search provided.

Alternatively, you could use a search toolbar program. Most search engines provide one, prominently offering these free utilities on their search websites. Before search functions were built into most browsers, this was the only way to get an integrated search tool. As well as providing basic search functions, toolbars often block pop-ups, highlight search terms in the webpage's body copy and so on. However, most browsers now perform these functions as well. If you have an up-to-date browser, there aren't many reasons to install a third-party search tool. There is one possible exception. The Google toolbar tells you the page ranking of any given page. This can be useful for anyone with their own website, and we'll come back to this shortly.

Website owners<

ADVERTISEMENT

Almost everyone who has their own website, unless it's a private site for a club or for family members, wants more readers. The easiest way to get more readers is to be one of the top results a user sees when they make a relevant search.

Ask anyone whose small business has its own website, and they'll tell you there are dozens of companies that promise they can help you boost your search engine ratings. Because they feel baffled by search engines, and the web in general, many small businesses gladly hand over this task to someone else. With a little careful thought, however, and some patience, you can do the job yourself.

A blank page

The first thing to consider is your site's content. Make it interesting and easy to find, and give it a relevant title. This will appear in the title bar of your browser, and is one of the things to which search engines give precedence when deciding how relevant your site is to any given search. Make sure your title is short, snappy and descriptive of your site's most important content. Put relevant, interesting information on the first page of your site. Never use a blank, or nearly blank, landing page. If the search engine (which looks only at text) can't see anything relevant on your site's homepage, this will probably hurt your page ranking.

You may also have read about metadata, words you can add to the header of your site that a search engine can see but remain invisible to users. Some unscrupulous sites try to misuse this feature to add popular but irrelevant search terms to their site. Don't do this, as you will be blacklisted by search engines. However, putting a relevant meta tag in your site's code can't hurt. Just don't expect it to be a magic fix that will suddenly see your site rocket to the top of the search results.

Adding meta tags to your site is easy. Open the HTML file for your homepage in a text editor such as Notepad and add the meta name tag as follows. Let's say we ran a website about Ford Cortinas and wanted to help other enthusiasts find our site with a few relevant meta tags. The HTML code would look like this: