By David Gikandi, Founder, SearchPositioning.com
[July 24th, 1999]

See Also   Email Marketing Primer   How to Increase Your Online Sales   Take Advantage of Google's AdWords   Using Foreign Search Engines to Boost Your Sales   Getting Sure Profits Through Google, Goto.com and DirectHit   Ten Places You Must Submit Your Site   Clever Profit Growth Software   The Power Of Personalized Email   How To Go Long With Your Web Marketing   How NOT to Promote Your E-business   Winning the Search Engine Wars   Latest Tips on Search Engine Marketing   Are You Wasting Your Money Online?   Should I Hire Another Salesperson or Invest in an Affiliate Program?   The Death of Positioning?   Links: Why You Need Them and How to Get Them   Your #1 Overlooked Business Asset

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 and the Web. We shall see how we can use these facts to promote our sites through the search engines more effectively. Of course, there are many more ways you can market your Web site, but the most effective both in results and in costs is getting included in the 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, the traffic from an engine is literally what will feed you. Search engines are the most popular tools that Web users use to find new information on the Net.

General Facts

Forrester Research estimates that there are 500 to 600 million pages on the Internet. That number is growing fast. However, the largest search engine, AltaVista, only has about 150 million pages indexed (about 27% of the whole Web), with Excite and Lycos at only about 50 million indexed (about 10% of the whole Web)! To a Webmaster, these are shocking statistics! The two main reasons why relatively few pages are indexed are (1) the Web is growing faster than the 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.

However, don't just slap these into your pages. Put some thought into them. For example, the text in the TITLE tag for a particular page should start with a word that summarizes the 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' 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 getting you better rankings.

Same thing with the 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 on the same page too as not all major engines support image maps either.

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.

The second thing to do is to submit only your home page and perhaps one other major page and let the 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.

Because the 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 at the 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 in the 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 by the engines to increasingly use link popularity and traffic as an indicator of relevancy. What this means is that the more people link to your page relative to your competitors pages, the more you will rank highly 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 hard 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!

More: How to avoid "spamming" the search engines...