Search Engines 2002 report
2/22/2002
There have been major changes in the last year in the way search engines operate and show results. Since search engine marketing is such an important aspect of making a web site successful, we have put together some information and recommendations to keep you informed in order to help you get more visitors to your site via search engine submissions.
Paid submissions.
Many search engines have gone out of business, including Go, NBCi, and Excite. The ones that are left have been forced to find new ways to produce revenue, since web site ad revenue has become virtually non-existent. One of the most common revenue ideas they have come up with is to charge you and I for SUBMITTING our sites to their search engines, just to be listed in their site. Paying this fee does not mean that your site will come up higher in the search results, it just means your site will be listed, period. Paid submissions vary by search engine, but luckily there are only a few important ones that you will need to consider. These are:
Yahoo. In the past Yahoo required $200 to submit a site. Now they have upped the ante to $300, but the most controversial change was in January of this year they started a policy whereby each year thereafter (for new sites only) they will continue to charge $300 to your credit card or your site will be removed. This is very unpopular, of course, and we are hoping they change this policy soon. Large companies will not mind much but smaller companies will, as will companies that have many web domain names. We will keep you informed if Yahoo changes this.
Inktomi. Because of the number of search engines that Inktomi provides content for, this used to be an important one to submit your site to, and they are currently charging a $39 per URL for 1 year. However we have not had very consistent results with submissions to this engine, and we have found that many times our sites were already indexed and submitting them to the paid listings did nothing.
Altavista. Not as much exposure as an Inktomi listing, but still worth the $39 Altavista is charging, although its only for 6 months. They have a free submission that works well, so maybe not worth the $$.
Again, there are others you can pay to submit to, but in our opinion these are the most crucial to invest in.
Paid Placement.
Several major search engines offer paid listings, giving your site a higher more prominent position than other sites. The exact positions of these listings vary. They can appear above editorial links, at the bottom of editorial content, or listed alongside the search engine's editorial area. 2 of the best Search engine programs are Overture and Google Adwords. Overture (formerly goto.com) will charge your account only when someone clicks on your link, while Google Adwords charges by the page view, i.e. when someone types in a keyword that you pre-select. We generally recommend these sites when creating a search engine budget for our clients.
Free Submissions.
One of our favorite words is 'FREE' and there are still plenty of sites where you can submit your site for nothing. The problem is that only a handful of these will actually send your site a reasonable amount of hits.
These are:
The Open Directory (see below for description), www.dmoz.org, is a free directory that many people don’t know even exists. However, the search engines know; many of them use DMOZ’s free directory data in their search results. This is what makes DMOZ such an important site to submit to, however it must be done manually and keywords are very important when submitting.
Google has a free submission area, however submitting to DMOZ will also populate Google as well.
Alltheweb.com is a search engine gaining popularity and it is used by Lycos for some of their results. Thus a free submission to this site will help.
Keywords.
Surely the most important aspect of getting hits through the search engines is using correct keywords within your pages. Submitting your site to the search engines is important but if your site does not have the proper keywords, your paid and free submissions will be ineffective. Which keywords should you use and where do you place them? Choosing the correct keywords should be something you do with your web design company, as choosing the wrong keywords will send you either the wrong visitors or no visitors at all. Where you put the keywords within the HTML should also be handled by an experienced web designer, as some of the old “tricks” in keyword usage no longer work, and in some cases can actually lower your site’s placement.
Don’t lose the visitor!
By the time you spend all that time and money getting someone to find your site from a search engine, it doesn’t make much sense to lose them with a bad design. Your goal should be to drive qualified traffic to increasingly accurate destinations within your site. Here are some important tips on getting people to get what they were looking for from your site:
- Make your site about the customer.
- Make your site easy to use.
- Connect the search results to specific pages, sometimes called landing pages, on your web site.
- Keep your site relevant to the customer.
- Make the most relevant content visible at the search level.
- Tell people what to do.
- Create a voice and character your customers can trust.
- Tell them enough to make up their minds.
Search engine List.
OK, I’m sure many of you have gotten emails promising they will submit your site to the 200,000 top search engines. Sound like a bargain? Its probably not because as we have learned here, most of the major sites will only put your page on its listings with paid submissions, and many other times a manual submission must be made, with the proper keywords included, or the submission will be worthless. PLUS there are only a handful of search engines that are used for the majority of Internet searches in the US. Here are the most popular ones with descriptions of what they do:
AltaVista (www.altavista.com)
AltaVista is one of the oldest (1995) crawler-based search engines on the web. It has a large index of web pages and a wide range of power searching commands including news search, shopping search and multimedia search. If you are looking for something a little more unusual or hard to find on other engines, try Altavista.
AOL Search (search.aol.com)
AOL Search allows its members to search across the web and AOL's own content from one place. The main listings for categories and web sites USED to come from the Open Directory (see below) but now come from Inktomi (see below).
Google (www.google.com)
Google has the largest collection of web pages of any crawler-based search engine. It uses a new proprietary link analysis as a primary way to rank these pages by relevancy. Google provides web page search results to a variety of important partners, including Yahoo, Netscape Search, and Earthlink.
Inktomi (www.inktomi.com)
The Inktomi index also powers several other services. All of them tap into the same index, though results may be slightly different, because Inktomi provides ways for its partners to use a common index yet distinguish themselves. Inktomi partners include MSN, Lycos, AOL and Hotbot.
Lycos (www.lycos.com)
Lycos’ main listings come from AllTheWeb.com, with some results from the Open Directory project. In October 1998, Lycos acquired the competing HotBot search service.
Open Directory (www.dmoz.org)
The Open Directory uses volunteer editors to catalog the web. It was launched in June 1998 and was acquired by Netscape in November 1998. Google, Yahoo, and Netscape Search are some of the major sites using these listings, and there are dozens of smaller companies using them also, as DMOZ allows companies to use their directory free of charge.
Yahoo (www.yahoo.com)
Yahoo is the largest human-compiled guide to the web, with well over 1 million sites listed. If a search fails to find a match within Yahoo's own listings, then matches from Google are displayed. Yahoo is the oldest major web site directory, having launched in late 1994.
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