Simple Tricks That Help Get Favorable Search Engine Rankings

There are plenty of services that claim they can get your site displayed among the "top 10" in search engine listings for chosen key words. This is always true only if you choose an obscure word like "xantipodeanismatic" or something equally unusual or made-up. Choose a word like "sex" and you'll find that you aren't the first one to think it would be a good word to use in bringing traffic to your site. The funny thing is, unless your online business activities are directly sex-related, "sex" would be a poor keyword for you, even if it brought lots of traffic to your site. If you sell lawn mowers, you're more interested in being found by people searching for "lawn mowers" or "garden supplies" than those looking for anything else.

The Biggest Search Engines and Directories

These are the most popular general-purpose search engines and directories, according to most Web rating firms' figures. Rankings change, but this bunch, listed here in alphabetical order, almost always holds the top spots.

AllTheWeb

http://www.alltheweb.com

AllTheWeb has one of the most complete indexes of all Web pages. In theory, AllTheWeb will eventually list your site whether you submit it or not, but it has a submission page, so you might as well. It takes only about 10 seconds and costs nothing.

AltaVista

http://www.altavista.com

AltaVista has been around since 1995 and shows its age in some ways, but it's still popular. As of February, 2002, you were allowed to submit up to five URLs for free and hope they would get listed within four to six weeks or pay varying amounts, starting around $40, for faster service and listing enhancements of various types.

AOL Search

http://search.aol.com/

If you're an AOL member, you get a version of AOL Search that includes AOL's internal content. The rest of us get only access to non-AOL Web content. There is no point in submitting a URL to AOL Search. It uses listings from Open Directory (below) and Inktomi (also below). Submit to them and if your listings are accepted, they'll automatically show up on AOL Search.

Ask Jeeves

http://www.askjeeves.com

Submitting to Ask Jeeves is tedious and bound by many rules. The Jeeves trick is that readers are supposed to ask questions in natural English, like "Where do I buy a new CD player online?" and are supposed to get answers, like "From buyCDplayers.com." This means that instead of simply submitting a URL to Jeeves, you write answers to potential reader questions. Jeeves also has "partner sites" whose listings appear among the regular listings, in addition to sponsored links shown above the regular listings. Jeeves also shows search results from other search engines, including Overture, which charges for listings. Ask Jeeves gets less traffic than MSN, AOL, Lycos, Google, Yahoo! or Go.com, so you may not want to pay much attention to it.

Direct Hit

http://www.directhit.com

This one barely makes the list of big search engines, but submitting to it is fast and free, and Direct Hit results may also appear on other search engines, so it's worth your time.

Google

http://www.google.com

Google should be your number one submission priority. It is a popular site not only because it has one of the most complete indexes of the Web's content but also because it consistently gives readers accurate search results. The key to getting a high rank in Google is having as many other sites as possible link to yours. Since Google continually crawls the Web for new and updated pages, in theory yours will eventually get indexed even if you don't directly submit it, but a submission may speed up the listing process. Sites listed in Google also appear in Yahoo! and Netscape searches. The Google submission page is not easy to find from the site's main page, so here's the URL: http://www.google.com/addurl.html.

HotBot

http://www.hotbot.com

Submitting to HotBot is fast and free, and HotBot submissions often find their way into the Inktomi database, which is a nice feature because Inktomi charges to accept direct submissions. HotBot search results come from Direct Hit, Inktomi, and the Open Directory project, so submissions to them will also get your site listed on HotBot.

iWon

http://www.iwon.com

iWon is a "portal" that happens to offer a search feature. It gets traffic by offering readers a chance to win prizes. The more times they click on iWon, up to set limits, the greater their chances of winning. If your site is listed by Inktomi or you have signed up for Overture's "pay for performance" service, your site will automatically appear in iWon searches.

Inktomi

http://www.inktomi.com

Inktomi sells search services to others and doesn't have a search page of its own. If you're willing to pay $39 per year for one URL and $25 per additional URL (as of February 2002), Inktomi will crawl your site or sites every 48 hours so your listings will always be up to date. Inktomi provides search results to AOL, iWon, MSN, HotBot, and NBCi, among others.

LookSmart

http://www.looksmart.com

Don't even think about getting listed in LookSmart's human-edited directory unless you have $149 or more to spend (as of February 2002). If you are willing to pay for search engine listings, there are better ways to spend your money.

Lycos

http://www.lycos.com

Lycos grabs listings from AllTheWeb and the Open Directory Project, but also accepts free submissions at http://home.lycos.com/addasite.html. It shares ownership with HotBot, but the two sites operate independently.

MSN Search

http://search.msn.com

MSN Search gets its directory listings from (pricey) LookSmart and its search results from Inktomi. Since MSN search is currently the default search in Microsoft's Web browser, it is worth some attention. You can submit a commercial site free at http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm for inclusion in the general search results, which are shown below the paid listings.

Netscape Search

http://search.netscape.com

Netscape's directory takes all its listings from the Open Directory project, which Netscape owns, and its search results come from Google. List in these two, and you're in Netscape Search without any other work.

Open Directory

http://dmoz.org/

This is a human-categorized directory that relies on volunteer editors who each agree to maintain listings in at least one category. There is high editor turnover, and some editors work harder than others, so the time from a site's submission to its inclusion in the directory can vary widely, depending on the section of the directory to which it is submitted. You can, of course, always volunteer to become an Open Directory section or category editor yourself and make sure your own listing is always correct and up to date.

Overture (formerly GoTo.com)

http://overture.com/

This is a "pay for performance" service. You and other submitters "bid" for attention by offering to pay a set amount per referral to your sites. The one willing to pay the highest amount goes at the top of the list shown as the result of a keyword-based search or directory section, and the one with the lowest bid is at the bottom. After all the paid listings, you see free listings from Inktomi. The top bids in some categories are over one dollar per click. In others, there are no paid listings at all.

Yahoo!

http://www.yahoo.com

Once the undisputed king of Web directories, Yahoo! hasn't been maintaining its listings as well as it should. Apparently management has been concentrating on other site features, like free email, chat, clubs, and so on. Yahoo! is still one of the world's most popular Web sites and is the most popular independent portal (the other two top-ranked portal sites are MSN's and AOL's home pages, which are the first ones all their users see when they log on), but it seems that less of Yahoo!'s traffic goes to its directory or search than it did a few years ago. Yahoo!'s search function is Google's, repackaged, so a Google listing will get you at least some Yahoo! visibility, anyway.

The most obvious place for a search engine to pick up keywords from your site is in your text. Since many search engines read only 100 or 200 words into each page they scan, having words people are likely to use as search terms right up top on each page is important. For a garden center, it might be a good idea to have the first words on your site be, "Ralph's discount lawn and garden supply lawn mowers and parts seeds and fertilizer all kinds of lawn and garden tools and equipment discount prices serving Bradenton, Florida, residents for over 25 years."

This statement doesn't need to be large. It can be rather small type, and below it you can have a typical logo or a major headline of some sort. But what we just did, by adding a line of carefully chosen "top" copy, is make your page a little more search engine-friendly than one that starts with random words.

Let's think for a moment like a person using a search engine to find a new lawn mower.

The obvious phrase he or she ought to type in is "lawn mower," either as two words connected with a Boolean "AND" between them to make sure they get pages that have both words in them, or with the pair of words enclosed in quotation marks so that they get pages that contain those two words next to each other. But most Internet users are not sophisticated searchers; few probably even know how to use Boolean expressions (which are special algebraic terms used heavily in the binary arithmetic that governs the way computers work). That's okay; search engines allow for people who don't have deep computer knowledge, and if someone types "lawn" and "equipment" as separate words, it is likely that a page that has the words "lawn equipment" close together at or near the top will be displayed ahead of one that contains the sentence, "We were out on the lawn, wrestling with sound equipment for Dori's party."

If your hypothetical searcher (your prospective customer) is in Bradenton, Florida, and uses either or both of those two words as part of his or her search, you now come out on top of all the garden supply stores and lawn mower dealers in the rest of the world. You have the word "discount" in there in case someone thinks to put that one in, and you are also primed to get attention from people looking for "fertilizer" or "seeds" or even "garden tools."

There is no way you can anticipate every word that someone might use to find a business like yours on the World Wide Web, but you can easily cover the most common ones in a sentence or two. Not only that, since one way that search engines rank sites is by how often key words appear on them, and if you sell lawn mowers and garden supplies you are going to have words related to those products throughout your site, the added words up at the top increase the chance that your site will be one of the first ones your prospective customer sees.

Now let's increase your chance of getting attention by using your site's <title>, <description>, and <keywords> effectively. They're in brackets here (and on your site) because these words are meant only for machines to read, and enclosing them in brackets keeps them from being displayed by your prospect's browser. You can get quite detailed with these "metatags," as they are called. Here are the tags from the DaveCentral software archive site:

 <title>[DaveCentral] - welcome to DaveCentral, Software Archive</title>  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <meta name="description" content="DaveCentral Software Archive is an extensive listing of Internet shareware, freeware, betas and demos for Windows 3.X and Win95, all free downloads."> <meta name="keywords" content="shareware, software, freeware, anti-virus, browser, browsers, compression, editor ,editors, email, ftp, news readers, irc, telnet, screen savers, anti virus, windows, utilities, download, plugin, plug-in, plugins, winsock, 32-bit, 32bit, graphics, multimedia, telnet, vrml, authoring, Shareware, Software, Freeware, Anti-virus, Browser, Browsers, Compression, Editor , Editors, Email, FTP, News Readers, IRC, Telnet, Screen Savers, Anti Virus, Windows, Utilities, Download... 

… and we'll stop here, because there are hundreds more, most-ly minor variations on spelling and capitalization so that DaveCentral will appear whether a search engine user is looking for "Screensavers," "screen savers," "Screen Savers," or "screensavers."

Some search engines will scan and record these entire lists, and some will pick up only the first 200, 500 or 1000 characters of each one; search engines practices not only vary, but also often change, so there is no way of accommodating them all short of making special pages to attract each one of the majors, and keeping those pages up to date would take almost constant study of search engine behavior. You probably wouldn't get enough additional responses for that amount of effort to be worthwhile, so don't bother with it. Stick with the "one size fits all" solution.

Note that the DaveCentral keywords repeat themselves a number of times. This artificially increases the word relevancy for many of the words which the person who drew up this list felt that someone searching for downloadable shareware or free software might use. Some search engines use all of those keywords, some don't. But DaveCentral gets over 100,000 pageviews per day without any paid promotion at all, so this tactic combined with the fact that DaveCentral really does have all the content listed in those metatags makes it rank high in appropriate searches.

Paid search engine listings are another matter. Some pageview "bids" on Overture.com go over a dollar. Most of the pages that have these inflated amounts shown sell high-margin products or services in extremely competitive markets. It is possible that a company willing to pay a dollar or more just to get someone to look at its site may do this only for a week or two or possibly even just a few days. Perhaps a life insurance sales lead is worth that much, and some catalog merchants who rely on direct mail for most of their new customers might justify the expense by pointing out that it costs more than a dollar to print and mail even a small, simple catalog that includes an order form. The idea of paying for search results should be approached carefully, and you must choose the search words for which you are willing to pay with extreme caution. If you are an insurance agent catering to local individuals in Birmingham, Alabama, or Birmingham, England, you must make sure that you are paying for leads only in or near the correct Birmingham, and you certainly don't want to pay to bring curious eyes in Los Angeles or Tokyo to your Web site.

This goes back to the concept of forgetting about the hundreds of millions of Internet users out there and concentrating only on those who might be interested in your offering, and remembering that this might be only a few thousand people. It also brings up another thought: The amount of good a site listing in a huge, worldwide directory can do you may not be as great as you may think. How many of the millions who hit Yahoo! every day are going to be searching, instead of using Yahoo!'s free Web mail services? And of those searching, how many will be searching for your site or one like it?

Listings in small, regional business directories or, better yet, industry-specific directories, may be at least as productive as listings in major search engines. Whether or not you should pay for listings in regional or industry directories is another question, and you can answer only it by researching directories that cover your industry. Some business areas have excellent ones, and some don't. Some may have many competing directories, all vying for listing dollars and readers' attention. An example of this is the wedding services business. There seem to be hundreds of online directories trying to get florists, photographers, disk jockeys, caterers, limousine operators, and others to pay $10 or more for a listing. The problem is that it would cost hundreds of dollars per month to list in all of them, and most of them have minuscule readerships. Not only that, but there are many wedding services directories that offer free listings, and these directories usually have far more listings, and are therefore more popular, than ones that boast about how, for a small fee, your business can be the "exclusive" listing for your region.

When Paying for Search Engine Leads Makes Good Business Sense

Some companies, especially those in high-markup businesses that rely on their Web sites for sales, may find paid search engine placement worthwhile. Here are three reasons to pay for search engine placement.

1. It obviously works. You see the same companies running paid search engine listings month after month, year after year. These companies are not run by fools. If they didn't feel they were getting their money's worth, they would stop paying for those links.

2. 2. The most expensive paid search engine link costs less than the cheapest TV or print ad when you figure the expense per qualified prospect rather than the gross cost per viewer or reader. This is the most tightly focused type of ad campaign you can possibly run. Remember, when you pay for search engine listings, you are running paid advertising, and you must look at those listings as ads, not as Web content. An ad is an ad, in any medium.

3. Paid search engine referrals are easy to turn on and turn off. If you want more leads, you pay for them. If you have enough, you stop paying. You can also test your copy and the keywords you use for very short periods of time and use the increase or decrease in traffic you see to your Web site over a span as short as a few hours to fine-tune your campaign, instead of waiting days or weeks to evaluate each change, as you would need to do in any other medium.

This line of reasoning may not work for a news Web site that may only get a few dollars in advertising revenue per thousand pageviews. But, for a real estate agency or other business that can come up with a defined, closely targeted set of keywords potential customers are likely to use when searching, and stands to make hundreds or thousands of dollars from a single sale, it is a worthwhile promotional tactic.

The problem with directories that offer exclusive listings to businesses is that, by definition, they offer readers a limited set of choices. Readers your prospects are less likely to turn to a directory that is obviously no more than a series of paid ads than to one where they can find a larger selection.

None of this has anything to do with technology. It is all about human behavior. Is being a big fish in a small (directory) pond better than being a small fish in a huge search engine ocean? This question takes business-specific research and creative thought to answer, whether you are talking about online directories or paper ones. Once again, the Internet shows itself to be merely a means, not an end in itself.