Web & Search Engine Facts You Need to Know to Win the Marketing Game

Written by David Gikandi


To achieve any goal, you first need to know everything there is to know about your goal and its influencing environment. That way you can formulate a plan of attack that will work, and avoid time-wasting activities that will not. This applies to everything: running a business, waging a war, winning a race, and of course, marketing your web site. Information is power.

Here, we will focus on some interesting facts on search engines andrepparttar Web. We shall see how we can use these facts to promote our sites throughrepparttar 128436 search engines more effectively. Of course, there are many more ways you can market your web site, butrepparttar 128437 most effective both in results and in costs is getting included inrepparttar 128438 search engines and getting a good rank in searches for your products or services. That's because getting listed in a search engine is free, but if you are placed well,repparttar 128439 traffic from an engine is literally what will feed you. Search engines arerepparttar 128440 most popular tools that web users use to find new information onrepparttar 128441 Net.

- General Facts

Forrester Research estimates that there are 500 to 600 million pages onrepparttar 128442 Internet. That number is growing fast. However,repparttar 128443 largest search engine, AltaVista, only has about 150 million pages indexed (about 27% ofrepparttar 128444 whole Web), with Excite and Lycos at only about 50 million indexed (about 10% ofrepparttar 128445 whole Web)! From September 1996 until September 1997, none ofrepparttar 128446 search engines increased size significantly, despiterepparttar 128447 fact thatrepparttar 128448 web continued to grow! To a webmaster, these are shocking statistics! The two main reasons why relatively few pages are indexed are (1)repparttar 128449 Web is growing faster thanrepparttar 128450 engines can keep up with, and (2) many webmasters do not know how to design and submit their pages correctly. Getting and staying indexed well in a search engine needs a little more work than most people assume it does. You need a four-step approach.

The first thing you need to do is make sure that all your web pages can be reached from your home page within three clicks. Most engines will only crawl to three levels deep when indexing your site. Also, make sure all your pages have TITLE tags and META description and keyword tags as most engines now use these. It is also highly advisable to have META category, language, and robot revisit tags, and ALT tags on all your images. Don't just slap these into your pages. Put some thought into them. For example,repparttar 128451 text inrepparttar 128452 TITLE tag for a particular page should start with a word that summarizesrepparttar 128453 entire page (a keyword). Say you have a page that mostly has information on vacations in Cancun, Mexico. Your TITLE tag should read something like 'Cancun vacations, tours, and travels in Mexico. Packages include diving...' The word 'Cancun' startsrepparttar 128454 sentence, andrepparttar 128455 rest ofrepparttar 128456 sentence is made up of keywords that are related torepparttar 128457 content ofrepparttar 128458 page. This goes a long way in getting you better rankings. Same thing withrepparttar 128459 META tag text. If you use frames on your site, make sure you use good NOFRAMES tags since not all major engines support frames. If you don't, your pages simply will not be indexed by those engines. If you use image maps, make sure you have a text links navigation bar somewhere onrepparttar 128460 same page too as not all major engines support image maps either. Quick note:repparttar 128461 TITLE tag text should be only up to 200 characters long, withrepparttar 128462 first 80 characters beingrepparttar 128463 most important as these arerepparttar 128464 ones most engines focus on in ranking and results display. Do not simply repeat keywords inrepparttar 128465 title tag. Make some grammatical sense out ofrepparttar 128466 sentences but ensure thatrepparttar 128467 keywords feature early and are not diluted by too many 'junk' words.

The second thing to do is to submit only your home page and perhaps one other major page and letrepparttar 128468 engines crawl your site. I will explain this in depth below. The only exception is Infoseek. Infoseek does not crawl so you must submit every page on your site to it manually.

Becauserepparttar 128469 engines are so overwhelmed, you need a third step - you must monitor your submission and re-submit your home page every couple of weeks. The engine may have taken your submission but dropped it later (happens a lot with Excite), gone to your site and found it unavailable atrepparttar 128470 time, or just not indexed your site due to a technical error on their part. Resubmitting and checking on your submission every two weeks will ensure that you will eventually get in and stay inrepparttar 128471 index.

You also need to get as many people linking to your site as possible. Visit related sites and ask for a link to your site. There is a trend byrepparttar 128472 engines to increasingly use link popularity and traffic as an indicator of relevancy. What this means is thatrepparttar 128473 more people link to your page relative to your competitors pages,repparttar 128474 more you will rank highly onrepparttar 128475 engines. Not only will getting many incoming links get you a better rank onrepparttar 128476 engines, but it will also get you a lot of traffic (following links isrepparttar 128477 second most popular way people find new sites). Furthermore, on Excite, HotBot, and Lycos, link popularity also determines whetherrepparttar 128478 engine will crawl deep into your site and index more pages or not. Do not ignore this fourth step, no matter how hard it sounds!

Forrepparttar 128479 major engines, do not leaverepparttar 128480 submission process to automated programs and services. The major search engines are too important andrepparttar 128481 automated services sometimes do it wrong. You are only submittingrepparttar 128482 home page and one other major page to Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, Infoseek, Northern Light, and HotBot - that is not much work to do manually every two weeks!

- About Spamdexing

Becauserepparttar 128483 search engines are so overwhelmed, they are coming up with more ways to make their job easier and weed out pages they feel are not worth indexing. One ofrepparttar 128484 new developments is that most engines now insist or highly recommend that you only submit your home page to them and letrepparttar 128485 engine crawl through your site and indexrepparttar 128486 pages it finds. If you decide to go against this recommendation and submit a whole bunch of pages throughrepparttar 128487 online submission forms, you will risk being tagged as a "spamdexer" (index spammer). There is also an indication that engines like AltaVista give a higher ranking to crawled pages than submitted pages. So for your own interests, you want your pages crawled so that they have a higher score. Other engines like Excite will takerepparttar 128488 same amount of time to add your pages to their index whether you submit them manually or let it crawl to them from your home page. So not only will you be wasting your time submitting each and every page you have to Excite, but you will risk spamming that engine. Conclusion: submit only your home page and one other major page and letrepparttar 128489 engines crawl your site. The only exception is Infoseek. Infoseek does not crawl so you must submit every page on your site to it manually. You can make a list of URLs to your pages and email that to Infoseek if you have more than 50 pages you wish to submit (see their submission page for more details).

Latest Bytes on Search Engine Marketing

Written by David Gikandi


The search engine world is always changing. They are always up to something new, using new technology, coming up with new requirements and rules, and, of course, running into new glitches. As a web site owner, you need to know exactly what they are up to at any one moment so that you can get your site well placed in their indexes. After all, search engines deliverrepparttar bulk ofrepparttar 128435 traffic most sites get, so you cannot afford to ignore them. So let us have a look at what exactly is going on with various engines and how we can us this knowledge to our marketing benefit.

Tip: Use unique IP addresses for each site

Consider using a unique domain name and IP addresses for your doorways. Once in a while, it can happen that you go too far in your efforts to use various kinds of gateway pages (doorways, information frames, etc) to get higher placements on search engines. For example, you may be using too many keywords that are too alike and thereby ending up with duplicate pages or a cluster of high rankings forrepparttar 128436 same keyword. AltaVista is especially watchful for such mistakes. The penalties for such an error are usually justrepparttar 128437 penalization ofrepparttar 128438 offending page, or at worst caserepparttar 128439 search engine may block any new submissions fromrepparttar 128440 offending site. To make sure that such a mistake will have no negative effect on your web site even if your gateway pages do spam an engine due to improper use, it is highly recommend that you get a unique domain name that has its own IP address (those numbers that look like 206.67...789 that your hosting service tells you point to your domain name). Get two domain names, one for your site and one for your web promotion material such as doorways. For best effect, ensure that these domains are hosted by different hosting services. That guarantees that each domain name will definitely have a unique IP address. If you want to stick to one hosting service, ask your web hosting service to make sure that each domain name is assigned an IP address that is unique to it. While you are at it, get your hosting service to ensure that (a)repparttar 128441 IP address given to you is not shared by other sites on their server and (b) it has not been used before by a previous site that was on their server. Any of these situations can cause you to get penalized byrepparttar 128442 engines by spamming done byrepparttar 128443 sites that share your IP address orrepparttar 128444 one that used to own it.

Another good reason to have two domains is that AltaVista and Infoseek seem to have a limit onrepparttar 128445 total number of pages you can have indexed from one site. Infoseek supposedly limits this to 600 pages per domain. AltaVista's limit is much higher, if they do have one. So having two domains and splitting your pages among them can be a good idea if you have many pages.

Finally, for most ofrepparttar 128446 major engines, having links to your main site from another domain adds to your rankings. So your main site will rank better ifrepparttar 128447 doorways pointing to it are from a different domain than from within it. Yet another good reason to get a new domain name and hosting account just for your doorways.

While you are at it, try to get a long domain name for your doorways that is made up of your most important keywords. For example, if your site is about real estate in New York, you might want to getrepparttar 128448 name www.realestatenewyorkapartmentshouses.com or something like that. Keywords inrepparttar 128449 domain add to higher rankings.

How-to: How to submit torepparttar 128450 search engines

For allrepparttar 128451 major search engines, it is highly recommended that you only submit your home pages and hallway pages (hallways are pages that contain links to all your site's pages so search engines can find them). Letrepparttar 128452 search engine crawl and find your other pages. Make sure that you wait at least 30 minutes in between each submission (e.g. if you want to submit a home page and two hallway pages to Hotbot, submitrepparttar 128453 home page, wait at least 30 minutes, submitrepparttar 128454 hallway page, wait again, thenrepparttar 128455 next hallway page). For best results, submit these pages manually usingrepparttar 128456 search engine's submission page. Do not submit your other site pages. This is in line withrepparttar 128457 latest recommendations issued byrepparttar 128458 search engines. In fact, on some engines you may get tagged for spam review or get extra submitted pages ranked lower if you submit anything other thanrepparttar 128459 home and hallway pages. For all engines, re-submit your home and hallway pages once every fortnight to ensure that they remain indexed.

Tip: Infoseek submission

Infoseek's Add URL function had been down for quite a while but is now back up. However, it seems to now take about 5 - 7 weeks for newly submitted sites to get indexed. Also, it now only accepts submissions forrepparttar 128460 home page and not any other sub page. Fortunately their crawling seems to be good and eventuallyrepparttar 128461 spider will come to your home page and follow all links it finds onrepparttar 128462 home page to index sub pages. So forget about submitting other pages on your site - just submitrepparttar 128463 home page and make sure that all other pages on your site can somehow be reached fromrepparttar 128464 home page byrepparttar 128465 crawler.

Infoseek also uses channels as a search option. If you merely submit torepparttar 128466 usual Add URL link forrepparttar 128467 general search engine, you wont be found inrepparttar 128468 channels. So browserepparttar 128469 Channels on Infoseek and find one suitable for your site and submit your home page there.

Tip: Excite delays and subdirectories issue

Excite is still, in our experience,repparttar 128470 slowest ofrepparttar 128471 major engines when it comes to getting new pages indexed. It takes months to get pages indexed at times. We hope this is going to improve soon. We are sure a negative image is not what they want so we are betting that they are working on fixing this. The point to note is that Excite seems to be indexing every few months, talking in pages that were previously submitted before. So you should go ahead and treat it as if it works - submit your site as usual and re-submit every fortnight. When they do index again, at least you will be inrepparttar 128472 queue and get indexed.

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