Web Site Promotion Overview
Do you need to be in search engines?
Web site promotion by way of proper search engine submission is essential for most types of web sites, but not all. Which types require it? We answer this question by listing the different methods of website promotion (search engines being but one of these) and discuss how important each is to each type of website.
The different methods of website promotion are:
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Major search engines and directories
Successful ranking (first 3 pages) in one or more of the major search engines for one or more popular search phrases AND/OR being listed in one of the major internet directories (Yahoo, Looksmart, DMOZ).
| Essential: |
Small business,
Hobbyist and special interest.
Paying for Inclusion in Directories and Search Engines
May 01, 2002
"... It seems that everywhere we turn these days, we are constantly hearing the phrases pay-per-inclusion (PPI) and pay-per-click (PPC). There are now a number of ways that the search engines and directories are collecting funds from people trying to get their Web sites listed. ..."
Striving to Top the Search Lists
December 10, 2001
"... According to the Internet consultancy Jupiter Media Metrix, 59 percent of online buyers start at least some of their shopping excursions by typing a product name into a search site ..."
Search Engine Optimization and the Bottom-Line
January 04, 2002
"... for many clients, good search engine rankings can actually make or break a business..."
|
| Optional: |
Clubs, organizations and associations.
|
| Not required: |
Personal, family or special occasions.
|
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Specialized search engines and directories
(regional or topic specific)
Example, a Bed & Breakfast would want to be listed in the national B and B Online directory.
| Optional: |
Small business,
Hobbyist and special interest,
Clubs, organizations and associations.
|
| Not required: |
Personal, family or special occasions.
|
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Special announcements
Email, usually to a select group of people.
| Optional: |
Small business,
Hobbyist and special interest.
|
| Recommended: |
Personal, family or special occasions,
Clubs, organizations and associations.
|
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Banner ads
Placing your website's banner ads for broadcast on other websites.
| Optional: |
Small business.
|
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Advertising externally
Promotion on other forms of media, such as print media or television.
| Optional: |
Small business.
|
An Overview of the Basic Rules
It's an ongoing effort to get indexed and stay indexed. You want your rankings to improve over time - the goal is to be within the top 30 search results in at least one of the major search engines for your main keyword phrase, or you really are not ranked at all.
There are five (5) ways to improve or maintain your rankings:
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Keyword Optimization
(see below)
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Link Popularity
The more you are linked to by other web sites that have similar keywords to yours the more "popular" you are and the higher you rank for those keywords. This can only be expected to be a gradual improvement over time - the higher your rankings the more you're seen which thus increases your chances of being linked to by others which increases your popularity factor which then improves your rankings.
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Pay Search Engines
Most search engines allow you to guarantee a high ranking for specific keywords just by paying a fee. (see below)
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Success!
Nothing succeeds like success. The more people click to you in the search results the more the search engine likes you and the better your subsequent rankings. Also known as Content! Content! Content!
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Re-submit Correctly
Some search engines, like Google, say that you do not need to re-submit, especially if nothing on your web site has changed, because they will find your site anyway when they periodically spider the entire www. However, others (us included) say that it is a good idea to do so every 45 days if nothing has changed and every 3 weeks if keywords or content has changed significantly.
"... you can repromote your site to the search engines as often as you want, but more than once a month or so isn't going to do you much good. I recommend repromoting your home page and other important pages to the search engines 'Once a Month, whether they need it or not.'"
Also, you never re-submit to the directories (Yahoo!, DMOZ, LookSmart) once you've been admitted and never more than once every 90 days while you're still trying to get in.
Here are some excellent expert guidelines --
Paying for Inclusion in Directories and Search Engines
May 01, 2002
"... It seems that everywhere we turn these days, we are constantly hearing the phrases pay-per-inclusion (PPI) and pay-per-click (PPC). There are now a number of ways that the search engines and directories are collecting funds from people trying to get their Web sites listed. ..."
Striving to Top the Search Lists
December 10, 2001
"... The process has devolved into a cat-and- mouse game in recent years, with retailers trying to crack the search criteria of the most popular engines, so they can design their pages in ways that will catch the search engines' attention ..."
Surviving the Google Update
Andrew Gerhart, November 28, 2001
"...there are certain things that you need to do and certain things that you should not do. We will clarify what these things are ..."
Free Search Engine Submission Is Still Alive!
Danny Sullivan, October 2, 2001
"... Despite the multitude of paid participation programs being offered, it is indeed possible for web sites to get listed for free. ..."
Search Engine Optimization FREE!
Paul Boutin, August 6, 2001
"we came up with our own strategy for getting traffic from search engines and portals without having to fake people out..."
1. Prepare Your Web pages
1A. Determine the most effective primary and secondary keyword phrases
Ideally, this was completed in Step 1 before composing the page content. If not, adjust the content now accordingly.
GoTo.com
This tool can be used to obtain the frequency with which specific keyword phrases were searched on in the last month. It allows you to see what keyword phrases users are actually entering into the search engines and it ranks them according to frequency. Throw a few keywords at it and see what it can tell you. Select the most popular, yet relevant, user keyword phrases as the main keyword phrases of your web page(s). Do this analysis for every page that you consider important and unique enough to warrant submission to the search engines. Usually this is only your index page.
Here is a similar yet more accurate tool.
In addition, the following links provide a more sophisticated analysis of what constitutes well selected primary and secondary keyword phrases ...
Finding the Perfect Keywords
Expert Sumantra Roy factors in the number of existing pages which are already using a particular keyword phrase with the frequency data provided above to produce an "effectivity" index for determining the best keywords.
Focus Your Keywords
Successful web site promotion...
The Keyword Susser
Provides a convenient interface to the GoTo.com database of user entered keywords. Allows you to submit a list of keyword phrases and analyses their popularity.
Keywords Database Sites
Determine the most popular keywords in use at these FREE sites.
1B. Optimize the page(s) for search engine success by incorporating the primary and secondary keyword phrases into the page content
Ideally, this was completed in Step 1 (Web Site Design) before composing the page's content. If not, adjust the content now accordingly.
Power up Your Traffic with Search Engines
"... Think of one or two main keywords for your site, and make them appear 5-6 times each on your front page ..."
"... Some search engines will look for 'keyword density', meaning how far apart the keywords appear. Some will only look at the first 200 characters of your site, and count the number of times the keyword appears. Others will index a bit from the top, middle, and bottom parts of your website, and search them for keywords. Generally keyword density should be in the 2-3% range..."
Keyword Density Analyzer
Free online tool to test your pages for keyword(s) density.
1C. Add all required keyword related meta tags
Next, using the main keyword phrases incorporate them cleverly into your page´s meta tags. The following links provide the rules for this process.
Search Engine Optimization FREE!
"when it comes to getting ranked by search engines, the only tags that matter are TITLE, and the META tags KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION..."
Power up your Traffic with Search Engines
Some proven methods that will boost your ranking greatly.
Search Engine Promotion Secrets
"... some important coding aspects that need to be considered..."
HitBox Doctor
Online meta tag test.
META Tag Analyzer
Online meta tag test.
2. Do your submittals
2A. Determine what the major search engines are and their underlying feeds
Which search engines should you submit to? The answer is - all of them. However, you cannot submit to every search engine in the world manually (it would take forever) and you cannot rely exclusively on auto submission services for all of your submission requirements because they are not as reliable as manual submissions (some major engines will not even acknowledge them). The solution, then, is to manually submit to the major search engines - the ones that are currently the most popular - and auto submit to everything else.
So what are the major search engines? The answer to this question changes over time. Some search engines are popular one year and non-existent the next.
Andrew Gerhart, December 05, 2001, reports that
"... Altavista only gets 3.1800% of all search engine traffic (approx. 10 million a day). Compare this to Google who reportedly gets 23.4800% of all search engine traffic (approx. 75 million a day), or Yahoo who gets 37.7600% of all search engine traffic (approx. 121 million a day)...
... The major players (search engines and directories) on the Internet, when speaking in terms of amount of traffic, are Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN. The other search engines that are up and coming are Fast/AllTheWeb, WiseNut, and Teoma."
We rely on the following web site for the most up-to-date popularity rankings:
Search Engine Reviews, Ratings & Tests
URL: http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/index.html
Here you will find links to statistical reports concerning SE popularity. The data is always a few months old due to necessity, but this is good enough.
Now, to complete the analysis:
- Select the top 10 search engines from the statistical reports and consider these the major search engines. They alone account for about 72% of the total search engine activity for a given month.
- For each of these top 10 search engines determine their underlying "feed" engines (look at Search Engine Alliances Chart and Search Engine Relationship Chart). Some search engines use only their own indexes for results while others use an assortment of other search engines indexes as "feeds". Write these all down for each of the top 10 and cross out any duplicates. This distilled "feed" list is now your manual submission list.
2B. Do the required manual and auto submittals
- Manually submit just your index page to every search engine on the "feed" list that you have created above. Do this by going to each search engine home page and finding the link for 'add url' or 'submit url' or 'add site' or something similar. Enter the required information. The actual links to these "manual submission" pages are included in the example below.
- Auto submit just your index page to EVERY OTHER search engine not on the "feed" list. The top 10 only account for about 72% of the total search engine activity for a given month. This is not enough. You want to be in the upper 90th percentile in terms of search engine saturation. But this would take forever because you would have to submit to the top 50 (or thereabouts) and each would have to be analyzed and submitted to manually. This is why using an automatic submission service to complete the task is the most logical thing to do.
The auto submission service that we use is:
"... If you have a website you want to promote, you should check out SelfPromotion.com. It's a resource for do-it-yourselfers where you can learn to prepare your pages for the search engines, then use a sophisticated url submission robot to submit your webpages to all the important search engines and directories. You'll also find tutorials about website promotion, submitting to yahoo, and much more. Best of all, you can use the site for free -- if you like it, pay what YOU think it's worth! The guy who runs it has reinvented tipping! "
We paid a modest fee to establish a paid account that automatically resubmits our pages every 45 days for one year and transmits email notification each time this occurs.
- Auto submit all of your other important pages, if any, to EVERY search engine - even those on the "feed" list.
2C. Example - accurate as of 5/1/2002.
You find, after examining the underlying feed engines for each of the top 10 most popular search sites, that you must:
- Manually submit just your index page for FREE to these major directories. Each has it's own special submission procedure. Re-try every 90 days (no sooner) until your site is accepted and then do not re-submit. Confirm that your site is still indexed every month; if not, you may re-submit.
- Manually submit just your index page for a FEE to these major directories. Each has it's own special submission procedure.
- Manually submit just your index page to these FREE search engines. Re-submit to these every 45 days just to be safe.
- Manually submit just your index page to these FEE based search engines.
- Inktomi
- Sprinks
- GoTo
Note: We do not submit to these because we live by the "everything on the internet must be practically FREE" philosophy and the whole positioning-for-purchase idea undermines, in our opinion, a search engine's stated purpose. It would be wiser to rank websites according to their merit, as was originally intended, and have site owners agree to pay a small micro-fee to search engines whenever surfers are directed to their site. In fact, in the interest of defraying the cost of free content websites, which the owners must pay for but which benefit us all, we believe that every visit to every page should cost the surfer a small micro-payment to be accounted for in his/her monthly ISP bill and these payments should be forwarded automatically to the website owner. A world wide web of these internet accounts should exist ubiquitously and their functioning (the automatic debiting and crediting of accounts) should be transparent to both surfers and website owners alike. But anyway ...
- Auto submit just your index page to every other search engine in the world (those not done manually). The top 10 only account for about 72% of the total search engine activity for a given month. This is not enough. You want to be in the upper 90th percentile in terms of search engine saturation. But this would take forever because you would have to submit to the top 50 (or thereabouts) and each would have to be analyzed and submitted to manually. This is why using an automatic submission service to complete the task is the most logical thing to do. Re-submit to these every 45 days just to be sure.
The auto submission service that we use is:
"... If you have a website you want to promote, you should check out SelfPromotion.com. It's a resource for do-it-yourselfers where you can learn to prepare your pages for the search engines, then use a sophisticated url submission robot to submit your webpages to all the important search engines and directories. You'll also find tutorials about website promotion, submitting to yahoo, and much more. Best of all, you can use the site for free -- if you like it, pay what YOU think it's worth! The guy who runs it has reinvented tipping! "
We paid a modest fee to establish a paid account that automatically resubmits our pages every 45 days for one year and transmits email notification each time this occurs.
- Auto submit all of your other important pages, if any, to every search engine in the world INCLUDING those in the top 10 "feed" list. Re-submit every 45 days, just to be sure, at a rate of no more than one page every 25 hours per search engine.
3. Monitor Your Rankings
Track Your Search Engine Rankings Monthly
SERanker FREE!!!
Perfect tool to track your website´s ranking over time. You want to be ranked in the first three (3) pages of a search engine´s search results for your preferred keyword phrases. If you did everything correctly in
keyword selection & web page optimization (see above) and you submitted everything correctly your ranking should steadily increase over time, particularly if other websites start linking to your´s (thereby increasing your website´s popularity).
Listings of Every Search Engine,
Directory & Newsgroup
Search Engine Watch
Major, News, Specialty, Kids, Regional, Metacrawlers, Multimedia, Utilities
ZDNET Directory of Search Engines and Search Databases
Submit-Away
There are OVER 600 possible places to submit your web site.
