Search Engine Promotion

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Site owners always want to be number one in search engines. Imagine that you are a small travel agent. You probably would love it if people would go to a search engine, type "travel," and have a link to your site show up as the first one. You'd certainly get a large number of visits . Unfortunately, there probably are a lot of other people who would like to be number one, and being ranked 4,036th isn't going be worth much. In fact, if you are outside the first 20 sites or so returned, you probably aren't going to get many hits at all. Because of this, page authors are always trying to determine how search engines categorize pages, and they build their page with keywords in such a way to get a high ranking. In some ways, this idea is similar to how people name their company something like AAA Travel in order to be listed first in the phone book. Unfortunately, consider how many travel agents in the world want their sites to be in the top ten in search engines and you'll see a potential problem. The Web is not as geographically specific as the phone book. Consider if there were a single phone book for the United States. There probably would be dozen of pages filled with companies, all starting with AAA. The Web already has this problem, and that's one of the reasons you get so many results when you run a query for a competitive industry such as discount travel.

The war to be first in the search engine has an obvious final chapter-the rise of pay for position. Consider that the tricks to be at the top of the search engine list have spread rapidly . Even with common search phrases, it is nearly impossible to stay at the top of the list for long because other sites use the same search engine promotion techniques. Already search engines such as Google (www.google.com) and Overture (www.overture.com) are opting to push people who are willing to pay for position to the top of the list. For Google, "pay for play" is limited to special advertising entries, but for Overture , it is in the natural search result. Beyond these approaches, priority placement has long been made for banner ads triggered to correspond to particular search phrases. However, one wonders how long the separation between paid and free search listings will last. Consider that with the phone book, naming your company AAA Travel might put you at the top of the very small line listings, but readers might be overwhelmed with large display ads. It's very likely search engines eventually will adopt at least a variation of the same model. The eventual outcome of the search engine war will almost certainly be a return to traditional models of information retrieval methods used in other advertising forms in which you pay for audience relevancy and position. For now, page authors should consider the failure to take advantage of search engine positioning tricks to be very foolish, regardless of their long- term viability.

Note  

This is by no means a complete discussion of a topic that changes on a weekly basis. Readers looking for more up-to-date information are directed to the numerous site promotion sites that exist on the Web, especially Search Engine Watch (www.searchenginewatch.com).

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