Search Engine Positioning Solutions
Understanding Search Engines
To many people, search engines are a great mystery and are
largely misunderstood. People often expect that with little
effort, their site will be listed favorably in major search
engines like Yahoo, Google and MSN. They also expect that
once their site is live, search engines will automatically
review and catalog that site, making it available via search
engines. In most cases, neither of these expectations is accurate.
Web sites that are shown first as part of a users search result
are there because the owner of the site has spent a great
deal of time and/or money developing their search engine strategy.
To understand how to be listed in search engines you must
first understand how search engines work.
Primarily, search engines catalog (collect) information
using one of two methods. The first method is by maintaining
a directory of sites. This directory is an index of all
of the sites organized into categories and subcategories.
When your site is submitted, you dictate where your site
will appear. For example, if your company sold Laboratory
Furniture, Yahoo's search path might look something like
this: Home > Business and Economy > Business to Business
> Scientific > Supplies and Equipment > Laboratory
Equipment > Furniture. Yahoo and the Open Directory both
use the directory method.
The second method used by search engines to catalog information
is to "crawl" your site. Here, a program reads
each page of your site looking for specific keywords in
specific locations. The crawler creates a huge index (sometimes
called a catalog) from the pages that have been read. Google
is a good example of a web site that uses this method.
No matter how your web site is reviewed, the keywords that
the user enters are used to search the directory or catalog
to find a match of relevant sites.
| Key Considerations |
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How important are search engines in driving traffic
to your site? Search engines generate 7% to 8%
of traffic to web sites and 52 percent of Internet users
find web sites via direct navigation or through bookmarks.
That means most of your users aren't finding your website
using search engines.
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What is your budget? The companies that are
listed first within search engines are listed there
because of their significant investment in time and
money. Should you be spending money on search engines
or on other marketing efforts to drive traffic to your
site? |
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How well does your site respond to search engine
crawlers? The design and organization of your site
impacts how it is cataloged. |
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Select and use your keywords. The keywords
you select to use could make a big difference in how
your site is found within search engines. For example:
uncommon keywords such as TiffCO, MCSE are going to
perform much better than Computers, Wisconsin and networking.
Be specific. Be distinctive. |
| Solutions |
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Determine your entire marketing budget. Realize
that search engines, on average, generate seven to eight
percent of traffic to a given site. That means that
92 to 93 percent of people are getting to your site
by typing in your web address, clicking on a link from
another site or from a bookmark. As a result, you should
consider other forms of promoting your site as well.
Make sure your web site address is on every piece of
paper, E-mail and product that leaves your company.
Consider purchasing additional domain names if you have
a company name that is difficult to spell. Consider
traditional forms of marketing to support your Internet
initiatives. |
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Prepare your site for search engines. Web
sites that use image maps, frames, Javascript or Java
Applets may cause difficulty for crawler-based search
engines. For example, using flash in or as a homepage
page may stop a crawler from reviewing and indexing
any other page on your site. In addition, crawlers cannot
read text within graphics. Search engines catalog sites
based on the content and the keywords used within this
content. The more relevant content that you have, the
better your chance within search engines. A site that
has fifty pages of useful information has a better chance
for search engine success then a site that has two pages
of information. |
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Develop a method of measuring your success.
Utilize a reporting tool to measure your success and
to identify trends in customer use of your site. |
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Submit your site. Submit your site to the
most popular search engines and to engines that may
be relevant to your business. Realize that the top twenty
search engines drive 95% of search traffic, so companies
that promise submissions to 100, 200 or 300+ engines
are excessive. Consider submitting individually and
consider your cost benefit when submitting to sites
like Yahoo that charge you to submit your site. |
