Search engines will be a way for you to generate from as little
as 20% to as much as 60% of your business online (depending on
what other marketing techniques you use). Since there are over
130,000,000 webpages in existence (yes that is 130 million!), it
is extremely important to understand how they work and how to
increase your chances of being placed in the top 20 of the
search results. For example, if you were to type "music" and
"CD" into the AltaVista search engine as a keyword the result
would be over 1,000,000 related site URLs. Search engines are a
very powerful tool if you are in the top 50 results (preferably
the top 20), but are completely useless if you are listed
further down. You can bet that if you are further down than the
50th result, the searchee will not even see your site listing,
much less be able to visit it. As we all know, the beauty of
search engines is that they can bring you a large amount of
targeted traffic and it will not cost you a cent! It is crucial
you understand the basics of how search engines work if you want
to get traffic to your site from them. There are three main
types of search engines/directories. The first is a directory
(sometimes called a category database). This is not a true
search engine, but a listing of webpages by category. Many
directories allow you to enter in the description and keywords
for your site exactly as you would like them to appear. You
usually have to select the category you want it cited under,
too. A directory will not list your URL and will never become
aware of your site if you do not register with them. They do not
make use of "indexing software" (robots that crawl the web
looking for new sites and indexing them). An example of a
directory is Yahoo. Search engines (also called crawlers,
spiders, robots, and worms) vary to a large degree. They will
automatically index your site using "indexing software" or
"indexing robots". Depending on the complexity of the software,
here is what different search engines might do: 1.Index the
webpage (not the entire "website") you give them. 2.Index every
word of every page at that site. 3.Visit external links to crawl
through the web looking for any new sites 24 hours a day, 7 days
a week going from URL to URL until they have visited every
website that can be found on the Internet. By simply telling the
search engine what your URL is, its software robot will go there
automatically and index everything they need. Every search
engine has different criteria for returning search results which
makes a difference on how you want to submit your site as it can
drastically effect your ranking in search engines (we discuss
this quite extensively in the course, but it takes up over 30
pages, so we will skip it in this newsletter). It is important
to realize that many search engines change their algorithms on a
regular basis (i.e. weekly, monthly, etc.) - if you're listed
prominently today, that may no be true tomorrow. There are also
META search engines. These perform searches on multiple search
engines simultaneously. In this instance, your ranking for the
keywords inputted is calculated by the combined ranking of all
the search engines simultaneously used. The key to getting
ranked high is to make sure you're listed in all the search
engines used by the META search engines (They use: OpenText,
Lycos, WebCrawler, InfoSeek , Excite, AltaVista, Yahoo, HotBot,
and Einet Galaxy). It is not necessary to submit your site to
META search engines since they use the results of the major
search engines (not their own). I hope this helps in your future
marketing decisions.
About the author:
David Bell is Manager, Online Marketing, at
http://www.wspromotion.com/ , a leading Search Engine
Optimization services firm and Advertising Agency.
