In order to succeed in any endeavor, it's crucial to fully understand your objective and the factors that influence it. This allows you to devise a strategy that will yield results and avoid futile efforts. This principle applies to all aspects of life, including running a business, competing in a race, and most importantly, marketing your website. Knowledge is power. In this article, we will delve into some fascinating facts about search engines and the web, and how you can leverage this information to effectively promote your website through search engines.
Forrester Research estimates that there are between 500 to 600 million pages on the Internet, a number that is rapidly increasing. However, the largest search engine, AltaVista, only has about 150 million pages indexed, which is roughly 27% of the entire web. Excite and Lycos have even fewer pages indexed, at about 50 million each, or approximately 10% of the web. Despite the continuous growth of the web from September 1996 to September 1997, none of the search engines significantly increased their size. This is alarming news for webmasters. The two main reasons for the relatively low number of indexed pages are the rapid growth of the web, which outpaces the ability of search engines to keep up, and the lack of knowledge among many webmasters on how to properly design and submit their pages. To get and maintain a good index ranking in a search engine requires more effort than most people realize. A four-step approach is recommended.
Ensure that all your web pages can be accessed from your homepage within three clicks, as most engines will only crawl to three levels deep when indexing your site. Make sure all your pages have TITLE tags and META description and keyword tags, as most engines now use these. It's also advisable to have META category, language, and robot revisit tags, and ALT tags on all your images. Don't just insert these into your pages without thought. For example, the text in the TITLE tag for a particular page should start with a keyword that summarizes the entire page. If you have a page that primarily contains 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' starts the sentence, and the rest of the sentence is made up of keywords that are related to the content of the page. This goes a long way in improving your rankings. The same principle applies to the META tag text. If you use frames on your site, ensure you use good NOFRAMES tags, as 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, ensure you have a text links navigation bar on the same page too, as not all major engines support image maps either. Note: the TITLE tag text should be only up to 200 characters long, with the first 80 characters being the most important as these are the ones most engines focus on in ranking and results display. Do not simply repeat keywords in the title tag. Make some grammatical sense out of the sentences but ensure that the keywords feature early and are not diluted by too many 'junk' words.
Submit only your home page and perhaps one other major page and let the engines crawl your site. The only exception is Infoseek, which does not crawl, so you must submit every page on your site to it manually.
Due to the overwhelming number of submissions, you must monitor your submission and re-submit your home page every couple of weeks. The engine may have accepted your submission but dropped it later, visited your site and found it unavailable at the time, or simply 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 in the index.
Try 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 by the engines to increasingly use link popularity and traffic as an indicator of relevancy. This means that the more people link to your page relative to your competitors pages, the higher you will rank on the engines. Not only will getting many incoming links get you a better rank on the engines, but it will also get you a lot of traffic (following links is the second most popular way people find new sites). Furthermore, on Excite, HotBot, and Lycos, link popularity also determines whether the engine will crawl deep into your site and index more pages or not. Do not ignore this fourth step, no matter how challenging it sounds!
For the major engines, do not leave the submission process to automated programs and services. The major search engines are too important and the automated services sometimes do it wrong. You are only submitting the 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!
Because the 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 of the new developments is that most engines now insist or highly recommend that you only submit your home page to them and let the engine crawl through your site and index the pages it finds. If you decide to go against this recommendation and submit a whole bunch of pages through the 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 take the 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 let the 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).
There are a few other things to watch out for to avoid having your pages excluded from the engines. The following are things that make an engine tag a particular page as spam and therefore not index it. Make sure that none of your pages has any of these.
Below are several useful facts and tips for each major search engine that you can use to improve your search engine marketing.
Yahoo is the most popular directory on the web. Many people have problems getting their site listed. A rough estimate is that only 1 out of every 10 submissions gets listed, if that. Moreover, it takes an estimated 4 to 15 weeks to be listed for those who actually get listed! Those who got listed had to resubmit their site an estimated 4 times over several weeks or months before getting listed (resubmitting too often is spamming, by the way). One this is for sure - you must get into Yahoo! For some sites, Yahoo actually brings them over 50% of their business. By the way, Yahoo now has an express submission service whereby you pay $199 for a response to your submission within 7 weeks. It doesn't guarantee that you will be listed with them, but at least you get to know within 7 days whether you are in or if not, why. Here is a set of links that you need to visit to learn how to successfully get into Yahoo.
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