September 2000   

What does this mean for you and your Web site? Putting it simply, if no one can find your home page, it might as well not exist. Your Web site's presence and dominance in the online world is now dependent on the site's "findability" through the leading search engines. In fact, statistics have shown over and over again that a specific site stands a better chance of getting visitors through search engine positioning than by word-of-mouth, traditional advertising, and casual surfing combined.

Being detected by the leading search engines and getting listed among the top 20 search results in the target category have been determined as the best ways to gain traffic, but what you must do to make that gain happen is the tricky part.

Submit Like Crazy

BrightPlanet.com, a provider of Internet content infrastructure and search data to Web-based businesses, has discovered that the Web's content is 500 times larger than it is perceived to be. Its studies have also shown that the existing search engines are indexing just a small fraction of the content of the Web.

This is primarily due to the current capabilities of the conventional search engines, which use "spiders" to "webcrawl" through links from one site to another. Even though this is an automatic process, you can actively introduce your site to the search engines by submitting your URLs for indexing and optimized positioning. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as it sounds.

One way to input your URL for search engine placement is by submitting details of your site to a "directory." Directory services are free; they require manual submission of both your URL and your contact information to a relevant and specific category. Major search engines go over these directories first, so if you submitted your site in the appropriate category, you stand a good chance of high placement when a search is done in that area.

Another route is to employ a submission or ranking service. A few "automated submission" entities guarantee submission of your URL to hundreds, even thousands, of search engines. They may offer this service for free or at a very low cost, but some of the major search engines have started to detect and block off URLs from automated submission software.

There are, however, more efficient search-engine submission services, according to Carl Hruza, an expert on all aspects of Internet Marketing and Promotion and owner of TopWebPromotion.com. Depending on your budget and level of competition, he says, you have several options:

• Tune-up Service. For $25 to $65 a month, many submission services will offer to tune-up your site, meaning they will spruce up your metatags, and manually submit your URL to the leading search engines and directories. This should suffice if you have low to medium competition in your business category.

• HTML and Content Revision Service. For about $55 to $95 a month, you can expect, aside from mere metatag adjustments, HTML and content revisions that will ensure that you get noticed by the leading search engines. For this service, your URL will also be manually submitted to the leading search engines and directories. Hruza recommends this solution if you have medium to high competition but a restricted budget.

• Doorway Page Service. If you have very high competition in your business category, are serious about search engine placement, and have the budget for it, you can employ the services of a submission company to design "doorway pages" that are optimized for search engine ranking. One caveat: there are software applications that can create many identical doorway pages from templates rigged to target the major search engines' specific positioning schemes and criteria. This means that there is potential for abuse. "Many search engines are now programmed to detect these pages and will penalize your site if you use them," Hruza warns.

Legitimate doorway page services have different charging schemes, some based on setup plus click-through fees, others are based on commissions depending on your ranking in defined search engines.

Optimize Your Findability Quotient

Aside from submitting URLs yourself or employing submission services, you can raise your chances of search engine positioning by designing a homepage that is high in "findability." Here are several time-tested suggestions from site-promotion experts:

• Use effective keywords. Michael Buck, Director of Marketing for SearchEngineWebPromotion.com says, "Every time your potential customers use the search engines, they qualify themselves as "hot prospects" by conducting searches on keywords that are directly related to your product or service. Their choice of keywords is proof that they have a genuine interest in what you offer. They made the "decision" to actively search the keywords that brought them to YOUR website. And when they get there, they are ready and willing to do business with you. At the very least, they're seriously considering it!"

That is why, according to Robin Nobles, the Director of Training for The Academy of Web Specialists, "the single most important thing you can do to ensure the success of your Web site is to choose the right keywords." Nobles, who wrote "Maximize Web Site Traffic, Build Web Site Traffic Fast and Free by Optimizing Search Engine Placement," adds, "If you don't choose the right keywords, all of your [search engine] strategies won't help you at all, because those strategies build on top of choosing the right keywords."

In choosing the right keywords, Nobles suggests a combination of general words and specific words to form specific keyword phrases that describe your business identity and purpose. The keyword phrases should not, however, be so fine-tuned that no one is using them. You may also want to consider regional keywords, different terminologies, and the names of your individual goods and services.

• Aim for keyword prominence. Choosing the right keywords and adding them to your metatags is just the first step. Placing these keywords strategically within your Web page is another way to grab the attention of search engines.

Brent Winters, President of FirstPlace Software, Inc., a manufacturer of the search-engine positioning software Web Position Gold, offers tips on improving your keywords' "prominence" score. He advises mentioning your most important keywords in the beginning of the title tag (not just anywhere in the title tag), and very early in the body of the page.

Winters also suggests using the keyword phrases in heading and ALT IMG tags for better search-engine ranking.

• Add keyword relevancy. You may be tempted to keep repeating your keyword phrases in your page content, hoping that frequency will draw high ranking, but it doesn't exactly work that way. Winters explains, "Personally, I've found that in many instances, a short, one-paragraph page will often rank higher than a long wordy page even though the longer page may include the phrase more times. That's because many search engines divide the number of keywords by the number of total words on the page to score the page for 'relevancy.' Therefore, it's often the concentration of that phrase/keyword that matters more than the sheer frequency."

Become Popular

One final strategy for optimizing your placement in search engine results is to improve your popularity. Some search engines use link popularity in their ranking algorithms. This means that as more sites link to yours, the higher your listing rises in search-results placements.

Click-through popularity is another ranking scheme used by a few search engines. With the increase in the number of unique visitors that click on your listing in the search engine results, your chances of going up these search engines' rankings improve as well.

In other words, the more popular you become, the better your visibility in search-engine results. This may seem like a chicken-and-egg scenario but with a little traditional advertising, effective titles and catch phrases, and maybe some banner exchanges with pertinent sites, you can help improve your reputation and draw the crowd.

Summary

There is no one positioning strategy that will apply to all search engines; each search utility is unique and constantly evolving. But right now, experts agree on a few basic strategies: submit (with or without the help of professional submission services), use keywords effectively, and link-up with others. By employing these tactics consistently and aggressively, you can rest assured that you will see your URL among the top search results in your business category on any search engine on the 'Net. And your users and prospective customers will easily find you.