Search Engine Considerations for Market your Web

Search Engine Considerations

1.What are Search Engines looking for?

Each search engine has their own closely guarded algorithm as to how they rank web sites. Most search engines will provide a page for web masters on how to improve their web site's ranking with their particular search engine.

Probably the most important difference to be aware of is that Google considers Page Rank (explained below) to be most important, whereas Yahoo considers Content.

Page Rank (PR) is a piece of terminology invented by the founders of Google and is a logorithmic scale from 1-10. It refers to how many web pages (not sites), are linked to your web site and the importance of each of those linking web pages.

Google keeps the exact algorithm of how Page Ranking works, a secret. All the same, it has become so important that you can find web sites and forums solely dedicated to its analysis/guessing. The key elements are:

Get lots of high quality web pages linked to your site.
Try to get your link on pages with few other links (the PR is shared equally amongst all the links on that page, so more links, less value).
When you have a link on a page supposedly about 85% of the PR of that page is passed on.
It's the actual page the link is on that matters, the rest of the web site is irrelevant.
You can have a low and high rating with the same PR. Since it's logarithmic, for 2 pages with the same PR, one page could be almost 10 times higher rated than the other.

For the mathematically inclined, an example:

Linking Page:	PR = 5
Number of Links	5
Value of link to you	(PR of 5 / 5 Links) x 85%
What this makes your page	From low PR of 4, to low PR of 5
	Assuming your page itself has 0 PR

Yahoo, on the other hand is looking for lots of relevant content. Again, the exact algorithm they use to calculate a web site's relevance to a search is secret. The key elements are:

Your keywords need to be in your web page's copy, preferably the earlier in the copy the better. You are probably looking for a higher ranking with your home page, so you need to weigh up the importance of providing lots of content to Yahoo, without boring your customers.
While graphics are ignored by search engines, most will look at the alt tags attached to the images, so fill them with keywords.
Don't spam, they will ignore you. For example - first line of page is keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword. Remember Yahoo has "Real people" who will check out your site.
The formatting of your content can make it stand out to the search engines just as well as your users, such as printing in bold and bullet points.

There are no exact details of how search engines calculate the relevance of one web site over another. It is pretty safe to say that they all incorporate the aforementioned elements, to some degree or another. How important they view one criteria over another is what differentiates the search engines, as with Google versus Yahoo.

Remember, the search engines are trying to view your site from a User's perspective. They are working with a few keywords entered by the User. How useful do you think your site is going to be to this User, based purely on these few search words?

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2. How do you get Listed with the Search Engines?

Search engines will list you in one of 3 ways:

You submit your listing.
There are lots of automatic search engine submission tools available, some free, some not so free. If you submit your listing with an automatic program, make sure you know whether the search engine accepts this type of submission, since many will view it as spam.

If you have the time, in fact LOTS of time, the best way is to submit manually. That way you can tailor your submission for each search engine. As in the article above, each search engine sets different priorities on its search criteria.
The search engine crawls the web and finds your site.
Search engines crawl the web looking at sites. Since the number of web sites is so vast, it may take a "Crawl" of The Web a month or two to complete and even then will not include every site.

However you need your site to be "readable" to the search engine when it does find you. So having well written web pages and an accurate robots.txt file are very important. Here is an excellent resource on search engine crawls and robots.
You pay to be a "Sponsor".
Better known as Pay Per Click (PPC), there are some sites, most notably Google and Overture who provide this service. The concept is: You create an ad and keywords you want your ad to be identified with; every time a User enters those keywords into one of their affiliated search engines, your ad appears before the regular listings.

This part is free. Every time a user clicks on the ad to your web site, you pay. The advantage is that it's high profile for a very targeted search and you can create as many sets of keywords and ads as you want. After all, the more click throughs you generate, the more money they will make!

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3. Why NO ONE can ignore Search Engines

It doesn't matter what your site does, the search engines can get more people to you. So unless you are operating an intranet, this should be of interest to you.

You may say "All my traffic comes from specific sites with my target market". Fine, and you probably pay for that privilege. But being Number One on Google doesn't have to cost any money, just a LOT of hard work. If you start generating more traffic than these "specific sites" you are using, who should be paying for the privilege of a link?

Take our case study as an example. It is regionally specific in that buyers must come to them. Their industry and area are well covered with high traffic portals/associations. In their region, the rest of the industry use (read "PAYS") these portals almost exclusively for their web marketing sources. By focusing on generating traffic through search engines, in addition to the popular portals, A Coastal View Retreat have doubled their traffic.

Additinally the way search engines are evolving at the moment is to become more regionally specific. This makes it easier for a potential customer to find you. So while you may have been on the third page of Google searches for Widgets, if someone is in your region, you may now come on the first page. This however is just being implemented by some of the search engines and its full effect won't be seen until later.

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4. Some Do's and Dont's

DO submit manually

In particular with the big search engines.

DO have a process to develop links

Make them quality links, and as many as possible. You will be required to put reciprocal links on your own site. The link may be text, graphic or a banner ad. Make sure you do this with discretion and within context e.g. banner ads to porn sites all over your home page.

DO get the Alexa toolbar and Google toolbar

They will slow down the speed of your browser. They are collecting information about your traffic patterns; but they're free and they give you invaluable information.

DO go back to search engines

Check you got listed, where you got listed and if needed resubmit. Regularly recheck them, every month or two.

DO read the search engine suggestions on Listing

They're trying to help you get listed better - make the most of their advice.

DO go through your site

Make sure search engines will find what you want them to find.

DONT think all search engines work the same way

Search Engine History

DONT rely exclusively on automatic search engine listing programs

Many search engines view this as spamming.

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