Part 1 - Why Search Engines Are Important To You

You've built your site. You've tested it. You're ready for business.

So where are all the people?

You need to get the word out about your great site, but with limited resources and no advertising budget, you need some way to attract visitors.

What can you do?

Try the No.1 way people find out about sites - Search Engines!.

Search engine optimization (techniques to improve how your Web site ranks in the search engines) has been called the cheapest and most effective marketing tool available. Expect to pay professional firms that specialize in search engine optimization $1000 for a small site - $10,000 is common for big companies.

With a little research, time, and energy you can learn these techniques yourself.

You can easily blow your limited resources on banners and ads galore, but search engines will be more likely to send motivated visitors to your site.

Search engine traffic is the kind of traffic you want.

Why?

Traffic you receive from search engines is already targeted. Visitors arriving at your site from search engines have entered a keyword relevant to your site, so they are already interested in your product or service. This is the best source of potential customers you can have.

Search engines are the number one way users find new sites. Surveys show that over 85% of users rely on search engines to locate information on the Web. If you optimize your site to do well on the engines, then register your site with search engines, you should see increased traffic to your site.

Search engines are free to users and users know where and how to use them. One of the first things a novice to the Internet learns is how to use Yahoo (actually Yahoo is a directory, but we'll discuss the difference later).

Part 2 - The Basics

Before you can position your site to do well in the search engines, you need to understand search engine fundamentals.

A search engine is a giant database that lists sites on the Internet. You access the database when you enter keyword searches and receive a list of relevant sites.

Search sites are the Internet's Yellow Pages

Think of a search engine as a giant, automated version of the yellow pages. If you need information on "party planning" from the yellow pages, there are several steps to retrieving it.

• Go to the yellow pages and look under the alphabetized subject list for "party."
• Note the subcategories: "party planning" "party - children's", "party - rental equipment", and so on.
• Examine the companies listed under "party - planning" and decide which company best meets your needs.

Search Engines Versus Search Directories.

People use both search engines and directories without ever realizing there is a difference between the two.

• Directories (Yahoo, LookSmart, Snap) have human editors who review web pages, rank them, and then organize them into categorized lists with brief descriptions. The categories and descriptions are based on submissions, but are editied by professional editors (real people in the loop reviewing the sites being submitted).
• Search Engines (AltaVista, Excite, Google) have automated programs called spiders that index sites and score pages based on proprietary guidelines. There is no human judgement involved. Search engines index all the information on all the Web pages they find. The indexes are generated automatically, based on the words and phrases that are found on Web pages.

What is a Search Engine?

Search engines send automated computer programs (called robots or spiders) to crawl the Internet in search of Web pages. Basically these spiders follow links to travel from URL to URL. When they visit your Web site, the robot indexes (or records) the text of your page or pages (if it is a deep crawling spider) and stores it in the search engine's index. Later, when a user enters a search query at the search engine's Web site, the search engine scans Web pages in its index for pages that provide the best match.

In theory, the search engine spider is supposed to be able to find all the sites on the Internet. However, since new sites are being added daily, it's risky to assume that the spider will find you. Expedite the process by submitting your URL to the search engines.

What is a Directory?

Unlike the automated search engine process, each entry in a directory is first reviewed by a human being. You submit a short description to the directory for your entire site, or editors write one for sites they review. A keyword search will only look for matches in these descriptions, so be careful how you describe your site. Techniques to receive a high search engine rating will not work with a directory. While good content is necessary for search engines, both good content AND visual appeal are mandatory in human-edited directories. Remember, manual review takes time! The typical time lag between submission of a site and its actual listing in Yahoo is five months. You can speed up the process at some directories, but expect to pay for that service. This trend will probably continue.

• Yahoo!'s Business Express Program, offers express guaranteed consideration of your commercial Web site within seven (7) business days.
• Looksmart has recently moved to an exclusive pay for listing scheme - all new submissions must pay to have their site reviewed.

When you submit to a directory, do it by hand and take your time. You need to impress human reviewers with you site so high-quality content and design are critical to your success. For an in depth article on submitting to Yahoo, click here.

Search Engine and Directory Hierarchy

There are literally thousands of search engines on the Internet, but naturally you're most concerned about your ranking on the high-traffic sites. Some of the smaller search engines may not bring you a lot of traffic, but your listing gives you another source of links (which can help in your overall link popularity building).

If you can do well on the the sites listed below, you will probably do well on others too.

Top Search Engines

AltaVista
Excite
InfoSeek- Go
Lycos
HotBot
WebCrawler
Northern Light


Top Search Directories
Yahoo - The biggest search site of all. Do well here.
LookSmart
Snap
AOL

Part 3 - How to get listed

Don't wait to be discovered! Submit you URL directly to the search engine or directory.

Search Engine submissions.

• Manual Submission - Use the Add URL form from the search engine site itself.
  
  This way, you have absolute control over whereyour site is submitted. However, this process is that it is a very time consuming and labor intensive activity. Some search engines bury their Add URL form so far down in the site that one wonders if they are intentionally trying to thwart potential applicants.
  
  
• Automated Submission Tool - Fill in the data once and the tool automatically submits your URL to multiple engines.
  
  It is a fast, easy one step process and you only have to fill the data forms once. One down side to this is that because most submission services submit to many search engines, you may get spam email by some of the smaller engines that occasionally sell their email addresses.
  
  Note: It is not the submission tool company that is selling the email addresses, it is the search engines themselves. For this reason, we recommend you use an alternate email address when submitting with automated submission tools.

Your best strategy is to submit weekly until your site gets listed. Check your listing frequently. If your site disappears suddenly, you may be victim of a search engine database omission. Search engines frequently have multiple versions of their databases and they aren't always in sync. You may be listed in one version of their database and not in another. Your only recourse is to resubmit your site.

To see if you have even been picked up in a search engine, go to the search engine's site and do a search with your company's domain name as the search query.

Directory Submissions

Submitting to a directory is a much more involved specialized process. Don't do it in a rush and don't use an automated submission tool. The better submission tools, like Search Engine Starter, don't submit to directories.

How long does it take to get listed?

These times vary with search engines and directories. They will optimistically report a very short time, such as the following:

1-2 weeks: Altavista, Infoseek
2-4 weeks: Excite, HotBot, Lycos, Webcrawler
6-8 weeks: Yahoo

In reality, the search engines and directories are very backlogged and slow to get listings in or updated. Expect to wait much longer periods. Excite hasn't added new URLs in 6 months. As mentioned earlier, you may wait over 5 months to see your site get listed on Yahoo!, if it gets listed at all.

Is being listed engine good enough?

Unfortunately no.

A listing won't automatically increase your traffic. A good ranking may. You want to be listed on the first three pages of the search engine results page. Most web surfers aren't patient enough to look more than the first 20-40 listed links. In fact there is a considerable drop off just going from the first to the second page.

Part 4 - How to improve your ranking

How do search engines rank pages?

Search engines use a ranking algorithm to determine the order in which matching web pages are returned on the results page. Each web page is graded on the number of the search terms it contains, where the words are located in the document, and other criteria that changes frequently.

All search engines have a different method of ranking. That's why you might rank number 1 on one engine and number 25 on another. Robots look for relevance and rank results on a secret ever-changing algorithm. Some look at Title, some look at Meta tags, some look for link popularity. Search engine optimization means optimizing the Web site for the best possible positioning based on the page's keywords and description.

General tips to get a good ranking

1. Create a good site with good content.

This is critical, especially as search engines grow in sophistication. If your site contains worthwhile material, users will return to your site and will recommend it to others. Other sites will link to you: which will in turn help you by improving your link popularity.

2. Pick keywords visitors will actually use on a search engine query.

• If you have keywords that are very competitive, consider narrowing your focus to improve results. The keyword "horse" will return thousands of responses and may not place you near the top, while "Appaloosa" is more focused and targeted to a particular query.
• Consider using a keyword phrase instead of just one keyword. Visitors to search engines use phrases to narrow their searches. For example, instead of using a keyword like "horse" that would return too many responses, use a more specific keyword phrase like "Alabama Quarter horse."

3. Include keywords in your Title tag.

Pages with keywords appearing in the title are assumed to be more relevant to the topic than those without.

4. Use keywords in Meta Keyword and Description tags.

Using Meta tags will not hurt you in search engines that don't use them, and they can definitely help you in search engines that do index them. While they are not as important as the Title tag, Meta tags can give you the edge over your competition since most web sites don't even use them.

5. Use your keywords throughout your page.

Search engines will check to see if the keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. They assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the beginning.

6. Have a good keyword density on your page.

Keyword density is derived by dividing the frequency of that word by the total words on the page. Frequency is a major factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages. This can turn into a balancing act as too high a density can be considered spam by some engines. Usually you are safe if your keyword density falls between 1 - 5 %.

7. Continually work on improving your link popularity.

Listings on popular Web sites can increase your traffic significantly. They do this in two ways:

• They give potential visitors multiple paths to your Web site
• They can increase your ranking in search engines that use link popularity as part of their formula.

Most search engines use link popularity as relevance criteria. For example, the Google search engine (not their new directory) is based almost entirely on link popularity.

Summary

Success with search engines and directories is not one magical thing you do specifically. It is the culmination of your whole strategy. It is a time consuming, labor intensive activity with great rewards.

Best of luck.

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