"Understanding Search Engines and Marketing techniques
to drive traffic to your site."

earch engines are not built to be the same. They are in competition with each other, so each one develops and uses different technologies to search through the roughly 800 million Web pages that exist on the internet. That is why a page is can have high ranking in one search engine and not even appear in another. According to About.com, as of August, 1999, the World Wide Web contains roughly 800 million pages. The most complete search engine, NorthernLights, indexes only about one-sixth of what's out there. The three largest search sites (Yahoo, Excite and Lycos) ranked at the bottom of the list for percentage of coverage. (Do you "Yahoo!"? If so, it's with only 7.4 percent of the available Web pages.) The trend is toward popular pages becoming more so, while new pages have an increasingly more difficult time being recognized.

Examples of criteria used by some of the major search engines:

Link popularity
Search engines such as Excite, Infoseek and Lycos will check how many links there are to your site from other sites. Links boost the placement of the ranking. InfoSeek has a more complex link popularity system that places emphasis on linking site status and relevancy.

Meta tags
To a certain extent, it has been misunderstood how meta tags help in boosting rank postings; what often matters most is consistency on the index page of your site (see consistency below) with your meta tags. The use of meta tag keywords is favored by Altavista, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos and Web crawler. However AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, Netfind, NorthernLights and Web Crawler have low regard for meta tags descriptions or text in meta tags that exist alone without consistency. Consistency of keywords throughout the page (index page especially) is viewed as very important by Altavista, Hotbot and Web crawler. Hence, keywords have to be spread over the Web page, particularly near the end. So a front page with only images may look better but may suffer a lower ranking on some search engine results.

Stemming
Infoseek, Lycos and NorthernLights will search for variations of a word based on its stem. For example, searching for the word "optimization" will result in pages containing "optimize" or "optimizes."

Case sensitive and exact phrasing
AltaVista is the search engine that is case sensitive and requires exact phrasing. If you search for the phrase "search engine optimization" you would different results than from "search engines optimization."

So how do you market your site?
Here's the big buzzword from Connections '99...."Spiral Marketing" It means to drive Web traffic from your other media marketing, then use the Web to engage customers.

Four stages to Spiral Marketing
1. Use TV, print, and radio to drive traffic to the Web.
2. Use Web content to get customers involved.
3. Get their e-mail address (offer to add them to your mailing list).
4. Use e-mail as an incentive (special offers, coupons, giveaways) to go to the online store.

Your Virtual Storefront
Think of your Web site as another branch of your store. Don't use your advertising budget from your "real" store to promote it. Give it a separate marketing and advertising budget.

In essence, the new study on search engines tells us that your business is probably, based on percentages, an unlisted number on the Internet. And even if it is listed, you're subject to the other trend at work here: As Internet users become more savvy, they avoid search engines and visit the same sites they always visit. Often, they'll just type in the name of your business "www.yourbusinessname.com" and expect the site to be there. Based on these ideas, you don't want to spend too many of your resources making sure your name is in a directory that's harder to get into than a country club and used less and less. Instead, your energy should go toward placing your URL in the minds of your market so it's there when they need it. Search engines aren't working to drive traffic to your online brand.

Market like a brick-and-mortar store. Use TV, radio and print advertising as well as press releases and transit ads to drive traffic to the site. Every time you run an ad, put in your URL. Put your URL on business cards, letterhead, receipts, bags: everywhere you would place your phone number or logo. Give your current customers a reason to come to your Web site by offering online coupons or online e-commerce. You'll also want to market on the Web with banner ads and paid links on sites that attract your target audience.

Don't have a budget? Go for the gusto with link exchanges, e-mail, and word-of-mouth. These are the killer applications for online guerrilla marketing. They aren't sophisticated, but hey - they're free. Most people advertise their business even though they have their phone number in the phone book. You definitely should advertise your Web site because it may not be in the "phone book" (Search Engine).

[Welcome] [Design and Development] [Additional Services] [Promoting a Web Site]
[Contact Information]