How to make the most out of "Paid Submissions to Search Engines"Written by Alison Berke Morano
Okay, so cards are on table. There is basically no way into top Search Engines without paying for it in SOME way.I know, I know, Search Engines are supposed to be free and everyone has a level playing field when it comes to listings and "He (or she) Who Has Best Meta Tags" wins. But, it’s now more than that. Your well developed Meta Tags still count for a lot, but if you even want them looked at, you’re going to have to pay for it. Two Search Engines (Yahoo! & LookSmart) ask for money just to be considered for inclusion, others offer ways to ‘buy yourself to top’ or additional advertising in your categories or through your keywords. You could say that you’re standing firm, and refuse to give in to extortion, and keep submitting regular, old fashioned way, through free submission pages or by using submission software. But, at this point, with some Search Engines actually blackballing you from using their own submission pages (e.g. Inktomi), you have an uphill climb on your hands. So, if you are trying to decide where your money should go, and what best Return-on-Investment (ROI) is, and who to give your hard-earned money to, there are few must-do submission payments you should make: 1.Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) – Yahoo!’s $199 for submission is ONLY way you’re going get into their top-level categories. Even though they say that money only guarantees ‘consideration’ for your listing, it’s a pretty good bet that you’ll get into their directory if you do it correctly. (For Yahoo! Submission tips, please see my page http://www.keywordmarketing/yahoo.asp) 2.LookSmart! (http://www.looksmart.com) – With 75% of Internet Search traffic, and alliances with: MSN, Alta Vista, Excite, Iwon & CNN, $199 (or $99 for a basic submit, which can take up to 8 weeks) is also an
| | Analysing And Creating Highly Popular Web PagesWritten by David Gikandi
Today's webmaster faces a very common yet disturbing problem: getting a good position on major search engines. How many times have you ever wondered why, no matter what you do, you can't seem to find your site when you do a search for your keywords on Hotbot or Altavista? And you know, therefore, that no one else is finding your site and you are missing out on heaps of traffic. It is a very frustrating feeling common to webmasters.According to 1999 NEC Research Institute report, Web has over 800 million pages and most major engines only index about 10 per cent of that. To make matters worse, just getting indexed doesn't mean much unless you get indexed and ranked highly for your search terms. That's because most people never bother drill down beyond first 30 links returned on a search. The good news is that you can tune up your pages to get that top ranking. It is all a matter of careful analysis of current top ranking pages to figure out what text proportions and arrangements you need to use on your pages for them to get that same high rank. It is that simple, and many professional webmasters employ this technique very successfully. The first step is to analyse pages that are currently ranking at top of searches for keywords related to your business. Search engines look at almost all parts of a web page to calculate its rank. The title, meta tags, body text, links in page, alt tags, comments, form hidden fields and headings all usually count. By looking at exact number of words and keywords in each of these sections in a page that currently ranks highly, then applying those statistics to your own pages, you stand a very high chance of getting a similar high rank. You may not get exact same rank, primarily because search engines also use some other factors such as a page's popularity to adjust their ranking scores. But you will still get a very good rank near page that you analysed. What you would need to do would be to do a search on a keyword or phrase in a search engine. See what page ranks highest for that keyword or phrase. Make sure that actual page is same one displayed in search results and not a redirected page or a newer page. You do this by comparing file date, file size, and wording on title and description as they are on search engine results and on actual page. If it isn't same page that was indexed, move on to next highest-ranking page. The search engines do not always have most recent copy of a page on their index. For example, engine may have indexed a page on, say, June 12, 1998, and that page ranked 2 on your search. However, that page may have been changed, perhaps extensively, by its webmaster after that indexing was done, on maybe July 1, 1998. But that change may not be indexed yet because engine would revisit that page maybe 2 months later. So if you were doing your search and analysis on June 25, 1998, you would get old version appearing as a top ranking page, but when you click on to it, you would retrieve new version of page. The problem is that it is most likely that new version would not have same ranking as old one! So if you take its statistics and use them, your pages will rank poorly. What you should do always is look a little closer at information you get from your search results. Many engines provide extra information about each page on their results list such as file size. Look at reported file size on search result, then go on to actual page and see whether file size is just about same. On Internet Explorer, you do so by right-clicking on page and choosing Properties menu item from popup menu. Another way of finding out is seeing whether there are any differences in title and description of page on search engine results and on actual page itself. Most engines use page title as title of search listing, and meta description or first few words on a page as description on results. You might find, for example, that title on search result reads 'Super Real Estate Page' and on actual page it reads 'A Big Super Real Estate Page', meaning that page currently available is a modified version of one that was originally indexed at by search engine.
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