 June 1999
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Today's Search Engines are not always what you want them to be. By Rick Johnson To many, being #1 on the Internet means being #1 on the search engines. Everyone wants their site to come up first in the hope that Internet success will follow as millions of people visit our websites. Wouldn't it be great if search engines would know all about YOUR website and by simply typing in, say "Chicago", only your site would come up and not the 10,000 other sites that contain the word "Chicago". And wouldn't it be great if YOUR website could be #1 on all search engines, every time someone searched, never mind all the other website owners that want THEIR site to be #1. It's surprising how many people expect search engines to find their website, and actually get quite upset when they don't. Have you ever tried to find someone in a big city phone book? What if you collected all the phone books for all the major cities in the US, and THEN tried to find someone. This is what search engines are attempting to do. Search engines are a big deal! Many soon find out, however, that these mass indexes of the sum total of electronic knowledge are quite evasive, turning initial enthusiasm into confusion and frustration. How they work The thought of an "Engine" brings to mind some kind of a big metal thing going down a track, doesn't it? Of course, search engines are actually huge databases that attempt to catalog large amounts of Internet information. The confusing part is that they all tend to be different in the way they rank websites and in the way they produce output when a search is performed. There are two basic types, the true "Search Engine" and the "Directory". The search engine is more or less a large database of web sites compiled by computer. HotBot, AltaVista, and Lycos are examples of search engines. There are three basic elements to a Search Engine. Spider - A computer that travels the web visiting sites and collecting information for the search engine. Usually the website address needs to be 'submitted" to the search engine so it knows about your site and then sends its spider to visit. Index - The basic database of websites addresses and information the spider accumulates. Engine - The software and hardware that processes the users request for information and returns the appropriate information from the index. A Directory is a collection of web sites usually organized by subject. Yahoo! the most popular web index, is a directory. Like many web directories, Yahoo! is compiled by people, not computers. Each website is looked at and judged before it is accepted for the index. Many search engines, like Excite, also include directory listings of websites. The BIG BOYS Yes, there probably are hundreds of them out there, but most searches on the Internet are done on about eight or so of the big name search engines. Yahoo! has long been the clear leader, handling around half of all Internet searches. MSN (Microsoft) and Netscape search are next with about 35% of searches each. Why? Because they have the advantage of directing users to their sites when they push that big "Search" button on Netscape's or Explorer's toolbar.
Netscape Search and AOL NetFind both use Excite to power their search services, for example. This makes Excite a powerful contender given Netscape's popularity and AOL's millions of subscribers. MSN Search, HotBot, Goto, Snap, and parts of Yahoo! all use Inktomi for their search services, making this another very important player. Do Search Engines Work? All right, let's try a little test. Let's pick something at random and do a search to see what comes up. Will the same sites come up in the top 10 on different search engines and what can we learn by looking at the top ranked sites? We picked the phrase, "Landscape Design" and did the same search on HotBot, Excite, and AltaVista. Observations 1. All tree major search engines returned completely different results for the top 10. Not one site appeared in the top 10 on two engines. Why, because each engine ranks their results differently. How can anyone expect to be number one on all search engines? Even very aggressively marketed sites that are ranked quite high on some engines are often nowhere to be found on others. 2. Excite and HotBot results contained the words "Landscape" or "Design" in almost every title and usually several more times in the description. Often, the title on search results is taken from the title of the web page, and the description is obtained either from the Meta tags or the first few lines of text on the page. 3. AltaVista returned several websites in the first 10 sites on our search for "Landscape Design" that had nothing to do with our subject. The #1 site was a large links page with resources for accountants, and #7 was some kind of CGI computer programming site! It's frustrating to try to get your site listed when a search doesn't even come close to bring up the subject you're looking for! The Secret of Getting Listed. Picking Keyword Phrases - An absolute must! Target the wrong keywords and all your efforts will be in vain. Choose the right keywords, and you'll see your traffic improve. Therefore, think long and hard on what keywords people are likely to use to find you. Make lists of keywords and then combine them into two or three word phrases. For example, you rarely want to target a single keyword since with the billions of words indexed on the Web now, generally one word simply won't cut it. People learn quickly that if they type in "real estate" or "properties" that they get listings for real estate from all over the world! It would be nice if you popped up there on those extremely broad keywords, however, a better use of your time is to PAIR the generic keyword with something more specific. You might get lucky and rank well on just real estate since it's in your page too, but if not, at least you'll rank well on "Boston real estate", which will be far less difficult to achieve a good or top 20 listing for. These keywords will also bring you far more qualified prospects. It's amazing how many people try to monitor their positions on keywords that people are highly unlikely to use. 
For example, a well-meaning customer sent a list of his keywords for the "cheap airfares" that his company sold. His list went something like this: cheap flights "cheap flights" quote discounted airfares The word "cheap" alone does nothing to target their audience. It has to be paired with other words like "flights" or "airline reservations" to have any meaning. It's the same with "quote" and "discounted" -- too broad. Pair them with one or two other words. Statistically, most people search for two to three word phrases to avoid getting back too many unrelated matches. Keep this in mind when you plan and design your pages! In addition to the phrase like, "cheap airfares," also try to be creative and target others like "inexpensive airfares" too. See, it's all about thinking like your customer or clientele. You'll often find that there are more people searching for these other phrases than were searching for the first phrase you thought of. In marketing, this is called carving out your niche. Where to Put 'em The most effective place to put your keyword phrases is in the page title and in the text of the page. Use different phrases on each page and submit each one, not just your home page. The use of Meta Tags, the internal HTML code that lists keywords and descriptions, is important, but did you know that Meta Tags are ignored on Excite, Lycos, and Northern Light! In addition, they do nothing to boost your ranking on AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, or Northern Light. Put your key phrases everywhere on your pages, but be careful not to over repeat (Spam). It's not considered spamming to use keyword phrases on image ALT tags, within comment tags, link text, image and file names, or as directory names, in addition to page titles, meta tags, and regular text. Another very effective technique is to have a descriptive domain name, www.floorcovering.com, for example.
Submitting Your Site Telling the search engines about your site is easy and important. After all, they need to know about you, but make sure you've done your key word phrases first. Your page content is what will give you a good ranking, not constant submitting. Just go to the search site and find the link "Add URL" and just enter the information, usually only your web address and your email. Some say it's best to submit by hand to the top 10 engines. It's very important to correctly submit to Yahoo, being careful to read the instructions and pick the correct category. You've seen the ads... We'll submit your site to 1,000 search engines for $19.99! Some may be legitimate, but BEWARE! There's nothing magic about submitting, and since less than 10 engines handle over 90% of all Internet searches, those are the ones to concentrate on. Check how their site ranks before you pay them to rank yours. Guerrilla Marketing Secrets of the Pros It's not really a secret, if you take the time to do a little reading. Two excellent websites, www.bruceclay.com and www.searchenginewatch.com go into advanced search engine marketing in great detail. Here's the basic concept. Each search engine has it's own policies and rules of how it gathers information and ranks websites. Find out how an important search engine operates and build a page specifically targeted at that one engine, say AltaVista. Take it a step further and design 5 pages, each around one key phrase, each targeted at AltaVista. Each page will have links back to your main website. These are sometimes called "Bridge" or "Entry" pages. Then register each page with the targeted search engine. If you're ambitious, you might build 5 pages for each search engine times 8 engines, 40 pages! It's a lot of work. Us mere mortals can more easily use these ideas by simply fine tuning our individual website pages. For example, if your home page is mostly graphics, make sure to also register another one of your pages that contains text with Excite. Why? Excite does not read Meta Tags and relies mostly on text to rank pages. If you're not listed high on a major search engine does it mean the end of the world? Not necessarily. A link to your site on a specific site related to your industry or other directed contact such as a newsgroup might bring in more traffic than a general listing on a big search engine. Search engines are an important first step, but only one of the many ways you can promote and market your website. iBiz Rick Johnson is a Web
Developer for Vallon, Inc. in Minneapolis. |