March 19, 2002
You have developed a great looking website with great products and content. You have jazzed it up with all the cool Web tricks. You have even included well-written descriptions and keywords in the meta-tags of your Web pages. And then you did something more--you submitted it to a number of search engines and directories. And then you waited and waited and waited. But your Web traffic did not skyrocket.
Welcome to the hunt for the ever-elusive bulls-eye of the Search Engine Optimization (or SEO, for those acronym junkies amongst you). Cases abound where Web developers were able to increase the traffic to their sites just by changing a few keywords in their Web pages. And then there are countless others whose hairs are going gray in search of that killer Search Engine Optimization strategy.
Search engines are a burning topic for most of the e-business initiatives that rely upon Web traffic for profits and survival. It is a vast area in which many a savvy developer and marketer get lost. It has got significant bearings on the success of an e-business initiative. And did I mention strong financial implications, both to the e-business' revenue and promotional budget? If not done right (and there are many ways to do it wrong), then it has the potential to sabotage the chances of your success. And if done right (there exist a great number of right methods, too), it could place your website at the top of your target user's search list.
Preparation Pays
With such high stakes, it's no wonder Search Engine Submission and Optimization has become a hot segment within the e-business world and is no longer the domain of the amateurs. To ensure success of your search engine placement efforts, you need to do your homework, prepare thoroughly, execute well and perform continuous monitoring.
SEO is a complicated area and there are various aspects to it. Where you want to list your site, how much you want to spend, what types of target keywords you want to pursue, what information should be contained within your web pages and where you want your site to be deep linked are all very critical issues that you need to address if you want your SEO strategies to bear fruits. That is why it is imperative that you spend some time to prepare before you start on this endeavor.
Budget
Can you buy your way to the top of a search engine? Off course you can. Search engines have to make money, too, and the easiest way that they do so is to allow you to buy your way to top of the list that their users see. From a user's perspective, that makes you wonder how reliable that information is going to be, but that's a topic for a different article.
The first thing that you need to consider is the budget. Free listings on the search engines are still possible, but it takes lots of time, and their efficacy is not great.
You could pay the search engines to get included in their listings or you could pay to get deep linked in some of the editorial results of the search engines, or you could pay to have your content promoted at their sites or buy a banner ad or a placement on the site. All of this should be considered when you are finalizing your budget.
Apart from your team's time and effort, the budget considerations should also include listing fees for directories like Yahoo!, LookSmart, etc; listings fees for crawlers like Inktomi, AltaVista, AskJeeves, etc.; paid listing programs like Overture, Google, FindWhat, etc; and commercial products and services offered by various companies to submit your site to the search engines.
Description
Believe me--getting your site listed will only take you less than half way. Even if your site is listed in a search engine's listings, it doesn't mean that it will rank high up and well for the terms that you are looking for. Another aspect could be having your URL come up in a wrong search, which is as bad as it not showing up in any search. If a user lands on your Web page due to a misrepresentation, chances are high that the user will view this as giving misleading information to lure him or her to your site. The likely consequence of this is that the user will not do business with you.
So it behooves you that you research the types of keywords and information queries in response to which you would like your site's URL to appear. One critical success factor for search engine strategy is targeting the keyword that people query on. You must spend enough time to develop the list of keywords that are relevant to what you are offering. These keywords must also be what your target users are likely to query on.
There are various ways you can find out what people are searching for on the Web. Following are the links that allow you to find out in real time what people are searching using various search engines:
AltaVista
Ask Jeeves
MetaCrawler
CNET's Search.com
Galaxy StarGazer
Yahoo Shopping
Yahoo Buzz Index
Overture (GoTo)
Lycos 50
Google
Getting Listed
Getting listed on the search engines and directories is the next step. You will have to submit your URL to get listed in them. You can do it yourself or pay someone else to submit your URL to the search engines.
Editors--the flesh and bone types--compile the listing for the directories. Getting listed on the key directories of the Web--Yahoo, LookSmart, Open Directory, etc.--would do a whole lot of good to you. Such listings would make your site available to a great number of Web searchers and would increase the odds for any crawler-based search engine to pick up your website.
Search engines that automatically visit Web pages to compile their listings are called crawlers. You can be included in them by taking care of how you build your pages. Also, unlike directories, you can have more that one page listed with them. Some key Web crawlers that you may want to consider include Google, Inktomi, FAST Search, Teoma and AltaVista.
Another popular way --and profitable for the search engines--is the pay-per-click search engine, in which you bid on the search terms for which you want your site's listing to appear. Every time someone clicks on your site, you pay the search engines. This ensures a higher ranking for you, but it also exposes you for mischief as any one can keep clicking on your link just to increase your search engine bill. Overture (formerly GoTo) introduced this in 2001. Overture searches could be issued from Overture's website or thru some other search engine that uses its paid listings. Other paid-listings that are widely used include Google and FindWhat. It is a good idea to target them, too, in your search engine strategy.
Having an effective search engine strategy is very critical for the success of any e-business that depends upon the user traffic for business and revenue generation. It is also a very huge and complicated topic. So far we have scratched only a portion--submission to search engines--of it. In my next feature, we will take look at some prevalent and useful optimization techniques.
Strategic and results-oriented, Sunil has more than 15 years of experience in management and IT consulting. An entrepreneurial consultant, he had founded a business-to-business eCommerce company. Sunil has provided consulting services to large and small firms in the