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Search Engine News and Articles

Get your head seriously into the game.  Read our articles, and follow the links to read up-to-date news and search engine discussions.

Introduction to Search Engine Marketing

Why is it better to win on the search engines than to pay for top placement?  Because nearly 40% of search engine users click on the number one match in the search results.  Around 4% of them click on the number one sponsored match.  Do the math - that means around ten times more traffic.  That's because people trust search engines to provide unbiased information about the Internet.  Winning top ranking on a search engine for a frequently-searched phrase can change the momentum of your business.

There are search engines (Inktomi, AltaVista, Google, Teoma, AllTheWeb, MSN, and others), there are directories (Open Directory, Yahoo, LookSmart, and others), and there are portals (AOL, Netscape, iWon, Lycos, HotBot, Excite, WebCrawler).

The key to search engines is content-optimized web pages and popularity.

The key to a directory is the title, description, and url, plus the editor's evaluation of your site.

The key to the portals is winning on the search engine or directory where they get their results.  AOL, Netscape, Compuserve, iWon, and many more get results from Google.  Lycos gets its results from AllTheWeb.com.  AskJeeves gets it's results from Teoma.  HotBot, Excite, and WebCrawler get results from Overture, the pay-per-click search engine.

1. Quality - The quality of your website affects the editor's evaluation of your submission.  By "quality", we really mean utility or usefullness.  Terrific websites are favorably reviewed and may even get "extra credit" in the rankings by being selected as "editor's choice".  The quality will also influence other webmaster's decisions to link to your site.  Linking to your site increases your popularity, and thus your ranking on search engine results.
   
   
2. URL - The words in your url are considered by the Open Directory and LookSmart when they produce their search results.  Remember, Open Directory and LookSmart feed their results to hundreds of other search engines and portals.  For a word in a URL to help, it must be separated from other words by a dash.  For example, www.fried-chicken.com will score higher than www.friedchicken.com for the phrase "fried chicken," all other things being equal.
   
   
3. Title - The title is the most important factor in your site's eventual search engine ranking. Because directory search engines such as Yahoo only search through the title, description, and url you submit, having important keywords in your title is critical.  It's not easy though.
   
   
4. Description - The description is the second most important factor, for the reasons stated above.  In addition, your description must speak convincingly to the search engine user.
   
   
5. Content - For search engines which index your page using bots, such as AltaVista, Inktomi, and Google, the content is critical.  The ultimate example of a web page with good content would be a page from an encyclopedia.  The content must be brief, focused, and internally consistent.
   
   
6. Popularity - Popularity is a term used to describe Google's measurement of your site's importance to the web community.  It factors in the number, quality, and type of web pages which include links back to your page.
   
   
7. Optimization - After you have the highest quality website with the perfect url, finely honed titles and descriptions, focused content, and lots of websites linked back to yours, you may consider optimization.  Optimization involves analyzing your site to determine what phrases and keywords you are winning for, analyzing the competition to see what they are winning and why, and then fine-tuning the code on your page to help you win for specific searches.
   
   

General guidelines for achieving a higher search engine ranking:

Try to observe these simple rules for titles, tags, and content:

• Don't try to win top search engine placement for more than one specific search on any single page.
  
  
• Keep titles as brief as possible and include your keywords in them.
  
  
• Hold meta descriptions to 170 characters (including spaces) or less.
  
  
• Hold meta keywords to about 10 keywords.
  
  
• Make sure every piece is in harmony!
  
  

Search Engine Submission

Companies advertising search engine optimization say they will provide a "submitter service" to help your search engine ranking.  Don't believe them!  They will submit you, but it will NOT help.

When submission capabilities were set up on search engines, the programmers wanted to grow their databases quickly to improve their service to users.  Later, they found that Internet marketing companies were building software to submit the same site every day.  Those sites were performing well on the search engines because their ranking would not erode.  So the programmers began to exercise their trump card.  They would change the algorithms in the programming itself.  Now if you submit frequently, you are penalized.  And, over-submission gets you kicked off a search engine for a very long time.

How can a search engine find you if you never use a submitter?  Everyone has heard of spiders or bots - software that finds websites for the search engines to index.  Are you aware how those spiders actually work?

Spiders ride hyperlinks.  When a spider is on a website and finds a link, it follows that link to the new website.  The more sites that link to yours, the better chance you have to be spidered regularly.  And search engine algorithms give plus points to sites that spiders find.

And, even if your site stands completely unlinked, you will still be indexed eventually if you are on a SERVER with at least one other indexed website.

Hopefully, we have cleared up a myth.  Because you should be aware that firms marketing a submitter service are selling you something less than worthless.

Directory Registration

Despite our warnings about submitting to search engines, there is a certain degree of submission that MUST occur - registration with directories.

Directories are website indexes maintained and updated entirely by human input. The best known of these is Yahoo.  There is also the Open Directory Project (ODP), which supplies its database to hundreds of search engines, including AOL and Netscape.  Your placement in the ODP is therefore as important as Yahoo.

Submitting to a directory is like meeting the parents - you only get one chance to make that terrific impression.  If you blow it, you'll never get their respect.  You have to be incredibly careful when writing the description of your site.  Descriptions must be less than 170 characters.  They must contain NO marketing language.  If the editor thinks you're trying to get away with something, he or she will crop your description down to four or five words and NEVER change it.  Describe the content of your website, not your business.  Get your submission right the first time.