With recent bankruptcy of Excite@Home, and Altavista's admission that their search engine database hasn't been updated since July, it's clear that another round of consolidation is coming upon search engine industry.

The important question for marketers isn't necessarily which portals will survive, but which search engines will drive their search results.

Excite and Altavista clearly attract enough traffic to ensure that *someone* will keep those domain names active as search portals, but that doesn't mean that there will be an independent Altavista or Excite database behind those results.

Is Lycos A Textbook Case? The story of Lycos search engine is instructive - Lycos.com is still there, but actual search results are provided by FAST/AllTheWeb. We simply don't know who will be providing results for Altavista and Excite in a year

So big question remains: which players can afford to stay in game, and how does that affect our search engine positioning plans? Time will tell - I can only offer you informed speculation on fate of industry's major players.

Who's In? Google, Inktomi, FAST/AllTheWeb, and DirectHit. All of these have significant traffic, either directly or through their partners, and enough value in their databases to stay in business, at least for a while. DirectHit is different, since they don't attempt to crawl and index web, but they have strong partners, including MSN.

One of most popular marketing concepts today is "mini-site." A mini-site is essentially a one-page sales letter, linked to an order form, specifically designed to sell a single product or service. While mini-sites are very effective sales tools, it can be a major challenge to attract search engine referrals to a mini-site.

Conventional wisdom says that you have to buy your traffic through e-zine advertising, pay-per-click, and affiliate program commissions... but that's not whole story. A high percentage of sales of my new book have been from direct search engine referrals.

In fact, you can optimize a mini-site for search engines, although it may require some real HTML coding skills to get job done.

In general, mini-sites lack three things that search engines value most: keywords, content, and linkage.

The Keyword Challenge Because a mini-site is a sales letter, choice of wording in headlines, and throughout site, is dictated by site's primary purpose - it's supposed to close sale. Somehow, a balance has to be struck between effective selling copy and keyword placement. In a moment, I'll explain how this can be done.

The Content Gap Most top-ranking sites carry significant content, optimized for a group of thematically related keywords. The structure of site itself contributes to overall search engine rankings and traffic, by reinforcing theme. A mini-site is only one page, with a sales message. Don't worry, there are several ways to bridge this gap.

The Missing Links Unfortunately, a "links" section sort of defeats purpose of a mini-site, which is designed to keep visitor in one place until they've made their decision. So, link swaps are out of question. Even affiliate programs usually don't help with link popularity because of way affiliate links work. This, too, can be overcome.

WARNING: This is a bit more complex than usual e-zine fare... you may have to read it twice to fully understand it.

Step One: Optimizing For Keywords The first obstacle is opening headline - you need it to be effective and attention-getting. The solution? If you can't change your headline, use an image instead of a regular H1 tag! With GIF or PNG compression, you should be able to bring even biggest headline in at less than 1K - you can also use your keywords in image's ALT property.

If you use an image for headline, you'll want to use Javascript to make sure your headline image preloads before rest of page - if you don't, you'll lose sales... and don't try this at all if your hosting provider isn't up to snuff - headline should load within 1 second on a typical 56K dialup connection.