This is reason we’re all fighting for high rankings in ‘organic’ results. This demand from businesses is also presumably main driving factor behind Ask Jeeves and Lycos starting to offer their own Search Engine Optimisation services.

Money Well Spent?

In short - I’m not sure.

If you have a 50 page website, getting Lycos to provide you with SEO services will cost you a tidy $10,000. They also include questionable tactic of re-submitting your website over and over to search engines which is both pointless and risky as some will act against those that submit more than once.

$10,000 sounds like a lot to me for a service that is only dealing with search engines and which talks of ‘recommendations’ that you then have to implement yourself.

Really though - it comes down to what you are trying to achieve with your website.

My two cents on this is that Lycos service doesn’t devote enough attention to links - your money may be better spent on getting more high quality in-bound links or on a well-managed Pay Per Click Campaign.

Ask Jeeves http://www.askjeeves.com

Lycos' SEO Service http://ranking.lycos.com/sitesidemore.html

Search Engine Users Survey http://www.clickz.com/stats/sectors/software/article.php/3348071

5. Keyword density. Each search engine has its own preference as to how many times a keyword phrase appears on page in order to signify relevance of that keyword phrase (in other words, in order to help search engine understand what page is about). Around 5 to 8 per cent is a rough guide as to optimal level. Don't overdo it, otherwise it will be seen as spam or keyword-stuffing. Also use your keywords in headings tags H1 and H2. There is an H3 tag as well, but it is doubtful whether search engines bother with that, as it is perceived as less prominent on page, therefore less relevant to what page is about.

6. Don't forget good linking in your website marketing. Search engines will judge importance of your web pages to some extent on number and quality of incoming links from other sites. Ask other webmasters with sites on similar themes to yours for a link, in exchange for a link back. These sites should not be in competition with yours, but should be similarly themed. You may occasionally be asked by other webmasters if they can link to your site. If this is so then have a look at their site; make sure that their site is relevant, that it has at least some Page Rank, and that it just "feels" good, and has no nasty surprises like redirects or unexpected popups. You don't want to be associated with a "bad neighborhood"!

7. Make sure that important keywords are included in anchor text within inbound links from other sites. This is crucial to search engines when they try to figure out relevance and importance of your pages. The inbound link from other site should take form of something like this (I'm using normal brackets instead of angle brackets so as not to use compromising html): (A href="http://www.Yoursite.com" rel="nofollow")your important keywords included here(/A). You should definitely avoid something like (A href="http://www.Yoursite.com" rel="nofollow")click here(/A), which tells search engines nothing except that your site is about "click here". Be careful!