All against one, and one against all

The consolidation of search engines

2005 culminates an on-going search engine consolidation process that has left three indisputable star players: Google as number one, Yahoo! and MSN Search. These three search engines represent between 85% and 95% of all traffic that arrives at a website directed by a search engine or directory service, and their databases feed results to many other search engines and meta-engines. Meanwhile, giant Microsoft continues to fine-tune its own technology in form of a beta version of MSN Search.

These three leaders are expected to fiercely compete in areas listed below, significantly impacting search engine marketing strategies.

oQuality of Natural Results: only time and market will tell what search engine will be able to generate best natural results (i.e. non-sponsored). Google seems to have most experience in this area, while Yahoo! has developed its own website indexing algorithm. MSN Search, on other hand, has been crawling Web for well over a year to generate its own database for Microsoft.

oLocal Search: being able to use a search engine to find closest pizza restaurant to our current location introduces an important geographic segmentation challenge. Google and Yahoo! have already taken first steps towards solving this problem and MSN Search will follow suit very soon (as we were finishing this article, Microsoft launched a beta version).

oFree e-mail: Yahoo! Mail and MSN Hotmail used to share spotlight as being leaders in offering free e-mail accounts. Google then pulled from its sleeve GMail, a free e-mail account service with 1GB of storage that uses a contextual publicity mechanism based on automatic analysis of e-mail content. Yahoo! Mail has reacted rapidly raising their free e-mail storage quota to 250 MB and offering a new e-mail variety, Mail Plus, that for less than $20 a year doubles storage space offered by Google. Once again, Microsoft has fallen behind in this contest even though it has elevated its storage quota to 250MB. It will be interesting to follow MSN’s reaction to Google’s bold move.

oDesktop Search: Apple, once again, pioneered this concept and offered a solution in their Sherlock tool, which has been for some time a standard component of MacOS. However, Google Desktop has been first offering of such an application for Windows desktops and once again, Google has beat giant from Redmond in its own turf, perhaps anticipating that Microsoft could integrate MSN Search in their next release of Windows operating system, just like they did a while back with Explorer, critically wounding Netscape Navigator.

Optimize and re-optimize, it pays off

Google’s success has proven that users will utilize those search engines that are capable of generating results that present in their first page of results those websites that are most relevant to searching criteria provided. With this mission in mind, both webmasters and web positioning experts have tried to position their websites within highest ranking results for maximum number of categories, all to attract largest amount of traffic. The traditional bag of “tricks”, such as keyword saturation, hidden or invisible text, meta-tags saturation, link farms, mirror sites, continuous search engine registrations, etc., is a thing of past. The algorithms employed by modern search engines have been learning every new “trick” just as quickly as “experts” have been discovering and taking advantage of all weaknesses of web crawlers. This constant confrontation has spawned a mutual perfectionism. On one hand, searching algorithms are now harder to “trick” and they are able to progressively generate more pertinent results ordered in a hierarchy that users find more useful and efficient. On other hand, webmasters and Internet professionals have discovered that it is more important to correctly identify market niche being targeted, generate rich and high quality contents, provide frequent updates, use well structured and purified code, make site highly usable and accessible, rather than utilizing an absurd language simply to “satisfy” Googlebot, for example. In area of web optimization, immediate attention should be given to following points:

oCommon sense - How useful is it to appear first on a search if when users arrive at a page they find a repetitive and absurd language and an ill-formed and difficult to follow structure? Or, to put it in a different way, do we have a website designed to attract a lot of visitors or to attract a lot of clients? Appearing first on a search engine is similar to having your prospective clients lined outside your door. There is still a long way before those clients walk in, actually choose something and pay for it.

oProfessional involvement - The time for optimization “tricks” has passed. Today, task of optimizing a website belongs to experts. These are professionals capable of generating coherent navigational structures, suggesting meaningful language for search engines and natural for visitors, adding access links from important and reputable external websites, and providing advise beyond technical aspects to identify market niches for each website and those keywords that will generate maximum rate of conversion from visitors to clients.

oContents – The creation of original and high quality contents provides highest return on investment. Writing articles, participating as a moderator in forums or chat rooms, or developing e-books or newsletters will translate into a rapid surge of qualified traffic not only from potential customers, but also from providers, collaborators and possible partners.

oAccess links – A very effective way to direct traffic to our website is by including links to it inside other important and related websites. This is due to several reasons.

oAppearing as a recommended link inside important portals positions us as experts or leaders in our domain, not only in front of an audience of potential customers, but also in front of our competition.

oThose external links pointing to our website increase our Page Rank, a popularity index that Google uses to express importance of a website and one of parameters that it considers when is placing final search results.

Of all methods of Web Site Promotion, Press Release is by far most beneficial tool available. It is also one of least used tools. When thinking of Web Site Promotion, a web site owner or his delegate has to consider what method of promotion will bring best results. But, a majority of these people fail to recognize significance of Press Release.

Press Releases are one of few documents that can be submitted one time to one location, but be considered for publication in millions of other locations. Press Releases submitted to a quality News Distribution Service are routinely reviewed by a bunch of Journalists. Journalists from all forms of media consider use of Press Releases in their publication. It is probable that a Press Release of significance will get selected by numerous Journalists for inclusion in their publication or media as a Press Release, as well as used for a subsequent news feature. How many times has Google generated a Press Release that creates news features on television, radio, print publications, and all over Internet? In case you aren’t sure answer, every time.

Now, most of us will never write a Press Release of such significance as to reach all forms of media like a Google press release, but a simple Press Release from an unknown stands a pretty good chance of getting significant distribution. A Press Release published on Internet, immediately upon publication generates attention to your business or web site. How? Most of News Media select Press Releases for inclusion to their Internet news publications. Most of these News Media sites also are Free Content Providers to millions of other web sites by offering free news feed linkage from News Media site. Not all of sites using such feeds are going to select specific feed that carries your Press Release. But, what if only one in ten do? You cannot pay for banner ads or search engine placement that will give you as much promotion in a single day.

Press Releases are one of few documents that get published in other media that immediately attract attention to your business or web site. Newspapers, Newsletters, Magazines, and a large amount of company bulletin boards frequently pick up and publish Press Releases from News Distribution Services. If your Press Release is picked up for publication, first day of its release will probably be strongest in print media. However, newsletters and magazines usually are not a daily or weekly publication. So it’s possible that two weeks or a month after its release, your Press Release will get another strong viewing.

Press Releases are one of few documents that get published to numerous locations without much effort. One single Press Release, submitted to a quality News Distribution Service is considered for publication in millions of media publications, read by tens of million readers. So, even if only one of these publications picks up and publishes your Press Release . . . Do math!