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One of the most important ways to market a web site is to achieve and maintain a good position on the major search engines. A good SEP (Search Engine Positioning) strategy should be an integral part of your web site marketing program. Wycombe provides an ongoing SEP program for web sites. If you would like more information or an evaluation of your site please contact us at 561 721-3337 or e-mail to info@wycombeweb.com.
| Some factors to consider when considering SEP Strategy | |
| Beware! Some services can do more harm than good! | |
| The Value of a Good Position | |
| The Use of Key Words | |
| Submitting A Site | |
| Tracking Your Site | |
| The Important Engines | |
BEWARE! SOME SERVICES CAN DO MORE HARM THAN GOOD!
There seems to be a constant barrage of e-mails from companies or individuals offering SEP services. Be very careful! Many such services offer to submit your web site to hundreds if not thousands of search engines and directories. There are only about 30 search engines and directories that are worth submitting to. Many of the others are what are known as FFAs (Free-For-Alls) that simply exist to harvest the e-mail addresses of web site owners for use in e-mail or "spam" advertising campaigns and do little to promote your site. Worse still, in order to submit to such engines they use automatic submission software which is frowned upon by the major search engines and can lead to your site being barred from being listed on the likes of Yahoo and others.
Some services actually guarantee top ten placement in the search engines. If it were that easy everybody would be listed in the top ten! The only way the guarantee can be met is by using some term that is so obscure that nobody will ever use it to find your site.
There are no guarantees or shortcuts when it comes to search engines. Good positioning comes from good preparation and optimization of a site before submission, manual submission to each of the major search engines and directories and continued tracking, adjustments and resubmissions.
A top ranking on one or more of the major search engines is the best way to drive traffic and, hence, potential customers to your site. Those that do find you this way are also pre-qualified because they were searching using key words that relate directly to your business (assuming the proper use of key words on your site). The potential marketplace for such individuals can be in a local area, nationwide or even world wide depending on your requirements. Despite the gloom mongers who prophesize the demise of the dot-coms, the Internet continues to grow at an accelerated rate with thousands of new users joining everyday. The best way to be found by these new users and existing ones is to acheive a good position on the search engines.
Key Words are the terms that a potential client may use in a search engine to find your site and others providing similar products or services. A selection of relevant key words should be embedded into the code for pages on your web site but this alone is not enough to acheive a good position on any given search engine. Other factors include:
| Keyword Prominence | How early in a web site do the key words appear |
| Keyword Frequency | How often a key word or phrase appears on the page |
| Keyword Weight | The number of key words appearing on a web page compared to the total number of words |
| Keyword Proximity | The placement of key words in relation to each other or words with similar meanings |
| Keyword Placement | Where abouts on the page that key words appear |
| Off -the-page Criteria | Links to other web pages and sites. Searcher behaviour after they visit a site and editorial reviews. |
Search engines may differ on how they evaluate the factors above but it is possible to optimize a site to be within generally acceptable limits. For example, if a web page contains 100 words and seven of them are a particular key word, the Keyword Weight for that word is 7%. Most search engines will accept a Keyword Weight between 3-10% but there are also preferences as to where the word appears eg. in the title, in the body text etc.
Improper use of key words can also result in the search engines refusing to list a site. For example, using the name of a celebrity to trick people into visiting your site can result in search engine banishment as well as annoyance of people who are genuinely looking for information on the celebrity.
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Before any submission to the search engines takes place it is important to ensure that the web site has been optimized to meet the various criteria of the search engines to which submission is to be made. It is a complete waste of time to submit only to be ignored by the search engine because your key word selection is innappropriate or incorrectly used through the site, especially on sites that now charge to review your submission!
What a search engine looks for in a site sometimes changes and other web sites may be submitted that push your site further down the position listings. For these reasons, it is necessary to keep up to date with what the sites like to see and resubmit your site on a regular basis (Not too frequently though, because the engines regard this as "spamdexing" and can banish you from their listings for this practice!).
It is also important to submit to the as many of the main search engines as possible. Most of the popular engines do not necessarily provide all search results from their own listings. For example, Yahoo returns the first ten results from its own database of web site listings. All subsequent results are provided by Google.
Several search engines use third-party databases for their results. For example, AOL, iWon, MSN, HotBot, LookSmart and NBCi are all powered by the Inktomi database. Lycos, Direct Hit, Google and, again, AOL, rely on the Open Directory Project (owned by Netscape Communications whis is owned by AOL!). As a consequence, getting listed in one engine can greatly help your site's position in another.
Increasingly, search engines are charging to review sites for inclusion in their listings. The only way to submit a commercial site to Yahoo, for example, is to ante-up their $199 express review fee ($699 for sites containing adult content). Remember, even paying these fees offers no guarantee that a site will be accepted. Careful planning and optimization prior to submission are key!
Pay-per-click search engines are another method of driving traffic to your site. Most prominent of these is Overture.com (formerly GoTo.com). These engines require that you open an account with enough money to cover your first month's traffic. You then ddecide how much you want to pay for your position on their listings for any given key words. For example, if you search for a given key word, say "antiques" on the Overture site, you may find that the top listing is paying $0.44 to Overture, every time a web surfer clicks on the search engine to go to the site. In order to take over the number one position, you would have to offer $0.45 for every referral to your site. Alternatively, you could get listed 9th on the page (still on the first page of results!) for only $0.16 for every click through.
There exist some engines referred to as Metasearch Engines. Most prominent of these are InfoSpace, Go3net.com, Dogpile and MetaCrawler. Instead of maintaining their own databases, these engines search the other main engines and directories and supply results from the best of the rest. Consequently, it follows that, to acheive a good ranking with these engines, it is necessary to acheive high positions with the engines that are used to farm results from. As there are no databases associated with these engines there is no submission procedures to them.
To maintain an SEP strategy it is necessary to track your site's position on the various search engines and directories. Analysing top ranking competitors also helps with optimizing your site. Like regular submissions, this should be an ongoing process. If you are not prepared to perform these duties you will have to be prepared to slip down the rankings into obscurity. Wycombe Web Works strives to stay on top of changes to search engine criteria changes and constantly monitor our clients' sites and their competitors as part of our ongoing SEP services.
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Wycombe Web Works prefers to submit only to the top 30 or so search engines and directories. Some clients believe there are benefits in being submitted to hundreds of directories and we can provide that service, very cheaply provided we can use the clients e-mail address for such submissions. However, our SEP services are primarily geared to getting our clients listed (and maintaining positions) with the likes of Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Lycos, HotBot, AltaVista, Excite, WebCrawler, Google and others.
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If you would like more information on Wycombe Web Works SEP Services, please contact us at 561 721-3337 or by e-mail info@wycombeweb.com.