By David Gikandi, CEO, SearchPositioning.com
[May 24th, 2000]

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

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 deliver the bulk of the 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 for the same keyword. AltaVista is especially watchful for such mistakes. The penalties for such an error are usually just the penalization of the offending page, or at worst case the search engine may block any new submissions from the 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) the 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 by the engines by spamming done by the sites that share your IP address or the one that used to own it.

Another good reason to have two domains is that AltaVista and Infoseek seem to have a limit on the 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 of the major engines, having links to your main site from another domain adds to your rankings. So your main site will rank better if the 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 get the name www.realestatenewyorkapartmentshouses.com or something like that. Keywords in the domain add to higher rankings.

How-to: How to submit to the search engines

For all the 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). Let the 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, submit the home page, wait at least 30 minutes, submit the hallway page, wait again, then the next hallway page).

For best results, submit these pages manually using the search engine's submission page. Do not submit your other site pages. This is in line with the latest recommendations issued by the 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 than the 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 for the home page and not any other sub page. Fortunately their crawling seems to be good and eventually the spider will come to your home page and follow all links it finds on the home page to index sub pages. So forget about submitting other pages on your site - just submit the home page and make sure that all other pages on your site can somehow be reached from the home page by the crawler.

Infoseek also uses channels as a search option. If you merely submit to the usual Add URL link for the general search engine, you wont be found in the channels. So browse the 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, the slowest of the 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 in the queue and get indexed.

Excite also seems to drop pages in subdirectories, favoring those pages in the root directory. It is highly recommend that you have your doorways and most other pages in the root directory (that's where your home page is) and make sure you have your own domain name. If you cannot do that, get a separate domain name and hosting account just for your doorways (even better!) so that you can have them in the root directory.

More: the latest news on Lycos, Hotbot and Alta Vista...