4. Don't question SEO process after it has begun - It should all be outlined in initial proposal, but a SEO worth his/her salt will make actual changes to your site. They will change visible text and/or design. They will probably get rid of that pretty Flash image or graphic from your home page. They might change your graphic navigation menu into a bland looking text menu. But remember they are doing this for a very good reason - to ensure your site is as search engine compatible as possible. Listen, learn and trust them - they're experts at this stuff.

5. Don't expect high rankings overnight - It really yanks my chain when clients call me up a week after their site has been submitted wanting to know why they're not ranking highly yet! All good things take time and it can take up to 3 or 4 months for search engines and directories to index your optimized content and re-rank your site accordingly. That said, you should notice an improvement on some of faster engines within 2 or 3 weeks.

>> 6. Don't assume traffic is goal - While your new SEO campaign might generate high traffic levels, your site needs to encourage all these visitors to stay, browse, join and/or buy from you. This means you need to ensure your site is looking its very best, your navigation structure is intuitive, copy is enticing and convincing and interactive features of your site (such as catalogs and shopping cart facilities) are working and easy to use. Not all of these items are responsibility of SEO.

7. Don't assume campaign ends with submission - Web sites are not static, they are not like a brochure that is printed and distributed. They should be thought of as organic - always growing and changing upon visitor demand. Are your site visitors finding your site via search queries for information on a particular product? Why not expand your web site to accommodate this demand? You should always be analyzing your log files or visitor statistics to see how people found your site, what pages they like best, what keywords they used to find you, how long they stayed and what they did while visiting. Use this information to grow your site and work with your SEO to expand your search engine focus.

8. Don't undo all their good work - Speaking from experience, there is NOTHING more frustrating than a client who makes significant changes to their optimized pages without telling you. I've heard horror stories from other SEOs about clients that agree to everything, let their site be optimized and re-launched and then completely remove carefully optimized body text or META tags a week later - aarrggh! I won't mention client of mine who decided to shut down their site for Christmas, removing all pages and optimized content without realizing impact this would have on their rankings. Search engines are constantly refreshing and indexing your site content. Just because your site is ranking well this month, doesn't mean it will rank that way forever. If you change your site significantly, your SEO's hard work and all your high rankings could be down drain.

Copyright © 2003 by Kalena Jordan. All rights reserved under U.S. and international law.

Article by Kalena Jordan, CEO of Web Rank. Kalena was one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australasia and is well known and respected in her field. For more of her articles on search engine ranking and online marketing, please visit High Search Engine Ranking.

>> Question 5 (WR) - There have been some complaints in various search engine forums about inability to clearly track traffic from LookSmart pay per click campaigns or even clearly track keywords which will trigger an appearance of their listing. Given click-tracking is vital to ROI measurement and standard with PPC models like Overture and Google AdWords, do you plan to introduce a more transparent click tracking and reporting system in future?

(DS) Today, LookSmart enables and encourages our larger advertising customers, who work directly with dedicated account managers, to add URL tracking to their LookSmart listings. This spring, LookSmart will be expanding this functionality to Small Business Listing customers who use our web-based platform. At that time, both large and small advertisers will be actively encouraged to include their own tracking on submitted URLs, whether site is submitted using our on-line forms or via our account management staff.

Question 6 (WR) - According to this Ezula press release from 2001, LookSmart have partnered with Ezula. According to Scumware.com, there have been suggestions that LookSmart's partnership with Ezula/TopText plugin produces false PPC clicks due to way TopText siphons off traffic from other sites. With no way to track clicks and no accountability measures in place, people are understandably suspicious that their clicks are not "genuine" and instead come from TopText and affiliate links. Can you comment on this?

(DS) LookSmart no longer has a relationship with eZula.

Question 7 (WR) - Given LookSmart results now rely largely on Inktomi and MSN, what does a listing in LookSmart offer customers these days? Why should people advertise on LookSmart when they can get high rankings in MSN using Overture PPC?

(DS) Actually, LookSmart serves >45 million search results per day on MSN, About.com, AltaVista, Netscape, Inktomi, InfoSpace (Excite, WebCrawler, MetaCrawler), Mamma.com, Cox Communications and Road Runner. According to Media Metrix Digital Media Audience Ratings, LookSmart search listings reach more than 77% or 4 out of 5 U.S. Internet users each month through this network.

Specific to MSN, LookSmart's paid inclusion listings are an important complement to Overture's pay-for-placement listings for a number of reasons:

Appear in core search results: LookSmart listings provide main body of search results on MSN. According to an extensive network traffic study completed in 2002, 74% of search users click in this section of page, while ~25% click in Sponsored Listings section. Therefore, without LookSmart, advertisers are missing a large percentage of possible lead volume.

Improved ROI: By using Overture's pay-for-placement for product introductions, seasonal and featured products and high margin products, and using lower cost paid inclusion for everything else, advertisers can get more total leads while lowering their costs, thus improving return on their search investment. LookSmart's paid inclusion listings, at a flat $0.15 CPC, are an ideal way to get into categories on MSN that are hotly contested on Overture and have high bid prices.

Access full range of searches: 40% of all searches are for terms with 3 or more words. Unless an advertiser is willing to manage thousands of keywords, it's tough to capture all 3,4,5 and more word searches that happen every day on MSN using pay-for-placement alone. However LookSmart's paid inclusion listings deliver this granular search traffic to advertisers automatically.

Show up for more searches: On MSN, Overture listings only appear for most popular searches. For example, do a search for "French cooking" or "men's jeans." You'll see that all results displayed come from LookSmart or LookSmart and MSN. Using LookSmart paid inclusion listings alongside Overture pay-for-placement listings gives you access to a much higher volume of searches.

Web Rank would like to thank Dakota Sullivan for taking time to respond to our questions.

Article by Kalena Jordan, CEO of Web Rank. Kalena was one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australasia and is well known and respected in her field. For more of her articles on search engine ranking and online marketing, please visit High Search Engine Ranking.