Navigating The Road To Registering Web Sites

Navigating the rocky road to search engine success is becoming an increasingly difficult challenge these days, even for those who have been successful at it.

Iconocast, an Internet marketing resource for e-marketers, reports that an estimated 100 million queries are entered into search engines worldwide every day, resulting in billions of search results. So, at the same time, the road gets rougher, success seems more elusive and the motivation and reward for tackling the challenge grows.

Perhaps most frustrating is that success, when achieved, is fleeting. In fact, search engine optimization gives a whole new dimension to the expression, here today, gone tomorrow.

So what does a business trying to establish that ever-critical Internet presence do? There are many options and weeding through them to determine the best path to take is the first and the most important step.

Manual submission, which requires painstaking research into each search engine and the processes it uses for ranking Web sites, is sometimes a successful route to take. However, it’s extremely time-consuming, as search engines are constantly changing the location of their submission pages and often bury them deep within their sites. This process is time prohibitive for most small businesses and even for many large ones.

A second option is to hire a search engine optimization consultant. Often these consultants will guarantee a top 20 ranking. This might make the $2,000 to $5,000 price tag easier to swallow but is still prohibitive for many of today’s businesses dependent on the Internet for sales growth.

More and more, Web professionals are choosing a third option— online services that offer search engine optimization and auto-submission tools. If well chosen, these tools provide invaluable assistance to ambitious businesses with limited resources. However, there are only a few of these tools that actually do what they promise. Too many of them promise more than they deliver, touting successful submission to more than 2,000 search engines with merely one click.

When Robin Rosenberg, senior futures and options strategist with Alaron Premier, a high-performance futures and options brokerage, grew weary of sorting through the many e-mail solicitations he was receiving, he turned to the company he had depended upon for the delivery of other Web services, NetMechanic, Huntsville, Ala., a provider of online maintenance, monitoring and promotion tools. At the time that Rosenberg was in search of promotion assistance, NetMechanic was releasing a new search engine optimization tool called Search Engine Power Pack.

This online tool encompasses all aspects of promotional services. From start to finish, five tools address all areas of promotion, including selection of keywords, proper implementation of meta tags and title tags, secrets to successful rankings, search engine submission and tracking of current rankings. Within the first two or three weeks, Alaron Premier was experiencing the significant jumps in its search engine rankings that Rosenberg wanted.

“Search Engine Power Pack is a great way to get a higher ranking in the search engines,” says Rosenberg. “Our site went up in the rankings for the engines I cared most about. I was able to learn more about the keywords that would best promote our site and how the most popular engines review and rank Web sites, as well as improve the construction of our site. The best part is that I saw the results I wanted right away, and I didn’t have to spend a lot of time making it happen.”

Minimizing time and maximizing results are key elements for all businesses. Also keep in mind with the wide variety of search engine tools available, businesses should be wary of products promising huge results for little or no cost.

Businesses can avoid false claims and misleading products by identifying their search engine goals early on. Planet IT product reviewer Rebecca Rohan cautions users to “keep in mind that only 20 to 30 search engines are worth your time. Most of the other engines are a means of getting your address for sending spam on gambling, pyramid schemes and other rot.”

Industry professionals like Rohan are another resource businesses can use to avoid misleading products.

Keeping a top ranking once its achieved is the next challenge in search engine optimization and something Rosenberg knows firsthand. “Search engines change too often,” he says. “Even when you get to the top, you can’t stay there, not without keeping an eye on your site and resubmitting when you see it start to slip. One of the things I like best about Search Engine Power Pack is the weekly report that tracks your rankings in the top 15 engines. You can resubmit to any or all of the top 100 search engines, as you need to. It’s a time-efficient process for obtaining and maintaining a high ranking.”

Like so many other businesses today, the futures-and-options field is very competitive. Rosenberg knew success among the top search engines would give him an edge over his competitors. Rosenberg’s definition for success with the search engines was simple— not necessarily easy, just simple: Get the company’s name out there where it could be found by people searching for futures and brokerage firms.

This is similar to the ambitions of most businesses seeking an online presence. Admittedly, Rosenberg has some changes he needs to make that he knows will improve his rankings even further. However, high rankings and search engine success has been attainable, even while he works on improving the site.