Search Engine Strategies

There are many great ways to market your web site, both on and off line, but for long-term success on the Internet, good placement on search engines can be critical. Being on the all-important first page of "hits" for a search brings new eyes to your businesses? products, goods and services.

Consequently there's a big marketplace for providers of services promising to register your domain name with thousands of search engines so you can leapfrog over the competition. Many of these services promise more than they can deliver. By understanding a few important factors in the way search engines rank sites, you will be able to make informed decisions about spending your marketing dollars.

The old days of free listings on a free Internet are over. With mainstay Yahoo!'s move to paid listings for inclusion in their business directory, the death knell for the days of free listings for your business sounded. If you want to do business online, you should expect to invest a minimum of $199 to register your web site with Yahoo!

As of a Feb. 21, 2001 study, Yahoo! generated 40 percent of all search referrals
worldwide, that's more than twice the searches of second position Google. Google is also Yahoo!'s source for the web site hits that appear after Yahoo!'s directory listing are exhausted, so Yahoo is still clearly in a leadership position among search engines.

Whether you're building your own web site or working with a web site designer, understanding the elements of how search engines work is an important first step.

Meta-Tags
Hopefully in building your business, you learn to think like your customers do to anticipate their needs. Keep that same customer-focused hat on to develop a one sentence (25 word or less) description of your web site and business. Then think of 50-100 key words that customers you want to reach might type into a search box.

These elements form the basis of your meta-tags and are added to the code behind your web page to represent the content of your web site to search engines. For more in-depth information about meta-tags refer to the New Jersey Small Business Development Center's web site at www.yourbizpartner.com/ecommerce to read the article on How to Register with Search Engines.

Meta-tags don't provide a guarantee of success, but without meta-tags, you will be at a competitive disadvantage. Make certain you have appropriate meta-tags on your web site.

Relevancy
Some search engines pay less attention to meta-tags and give more priority to the actual words on the pages on your web site. Take the marketing phase you came up with for your meta tag and use some elements of that phrase in text on your home page. You could use that phrase as a marketing tag line or an introduction for your site.

Mindless repetition is never a good strategy, but use unique words related to your business on your web site to hammer home your main themes. This will help people using these search terms (hopefully your products) to find your web site.

Also make certain that images on your web site have alt tags that describe their content. Designers like to use images for purposes of control of fixed sizes and a uniform look on your web site. But an image of a word will not be recognized by a search engine (which actually looks at the code that creates your page).

To determine whether the images on your page are alt tagged by allowing your mouse pointer to hover over the image. If you don't see a box appear that describes the contents of the image, you may not have alt tags on your web site. Talk to your web site's designer to add alt tags to your site.

New Technologies
Advances in web technologies create great opportunities to enhance the presentation of your web sites content and convey your businesses message, including direct sales.

If your web site uses Active Server Pages technology, or other dynamic elements including many shopping cart software programs, these technologies are stored in databases and are not accessible to all search engines. Try to use keywords that describe the contents of these databases in plain text, both on your pages and in meta-tags.

If your web site uses frame technology, what you see is not what the search engines see, so your web site designers must know to use meta-tags on the frame holder pages and to block access to the individual frames. Otherwise users will find and click through to incomplete pages.

Go Register!
Once you're satisfied that your web site is ready to go, take the learning experience of registering it yourself with the search engines. Basically, you go to the major search engines, and look for some kind of a link that says, "add url," "suggest a site," or something along the lines of "list your site."

Most of the search engine databases only require a user to list the domain name or page they want listed with the search engine. Some want an e-mail address (look out for pre-checked boxes that subscribe you to a newsletter) or some basic contact information, but most search engines just want an address to visit. Because these services are primarily automated, they will depend on your meta-tags (key words and content description), text of your page and image tags to determine your ranking.

Web directories (such as Yahoo!) request that you suggest a category where your web site fits. These services often employ live people to check the web sites to make certain that the descriptions match the actual contents and fit into the suggested categories.

Do not agree to pay for any services, grant reciprocal links to a search engine (unless it is specialized to your industry) or subscribe to anything with the exception of Yahoo! until you have carefully researched the popularity of the service.

Services that claim to list your web site with hundreds or thousands of search engines may not deliver any more eyeballs to your web site than one well placed listing on one major search engine.

The following chart shows the field of search engines is still rather narrow. Accordingly, focusing attention on registering your web site with the popular search engines will prove a better strategy than depending on services to register with hundreds of engines which won't yield significant traffic.

Yahoo!40.0%
Google16.5%
MSN11.7%
AOL.com Search9.0%
Netscape Search3.1%
GoTo.com2.9%
Excite2.8%
NBCi2.4%
Dogpile2.4%
Lycos2.1%
HotBot1.5%
AltaVista1.1%
Metacrawler1.0%
LookSmart0.9%
DirectHit0.6%
Mamma0.5%
CNET Search.com0.5%
Open Directory Project0.3%
Canada.com0.3%
Dictionary.com0.3%


"Source: WebSnapshot by MyComputer.com, http://www.websnapshot.com."


Nat Bender is the Dierctor, E-Business Services for the New Jersey Small Business Development Centers (http://www.njsbdc.com) where he works with small businesses in integrating e-commerce and information technology strategies into their business plans.