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We have come across many web page promotion questions. Here are some we have encountered, followed by the answers. If you have a question that isn't here please feel free to email us. Should I use an automated submission tool? Why is my website not appearing in searches online? Should I do this work myself or should I hire a professional? How long does it take to get listed on the search What kind of guarantee should I get if I hire out this work? How important are search engines in promoting my web site? What can I do right now to get myself listed better on the search engines? I want to be #1 when someone types in the word... Why am I listed on some search engines but not others? What is the most important search engine? Why won't Yahoo! list my site? What other things can I do to promote my site? I've heard about doorway pages. What are they and should I use them? What are the most important things to consider when looking to rank well? I've got some positions I really like. Now what do I do? What are the most common mistakes people make?
Should I use an automated submission tool? Automated submission software claims to submit you to 100-1000 engines or more, but these tools are basically useless -- submitting your site to never-visited, free for all (FFA) sites that only list a site for a few hours and get no traffic. 95% of search engine traffic comes from the 10 top engines. You are better off focusing on the engines that will yield the most results. Ranking well on these engines involves customizing pages to rank well for specific engines on specific phrases, doing pay-per-click campaigns, and other online marketing tactics. Web page promotion work, when done right, is customized specifically for a client's site and is largely done by hand. Why is my website not appearing in searches online? This problem has many sources. Sites that contain heavy JavaScript, are designed with frames, have Flash intros or Flash pages, and sometimes sites with dynamic urls can be poorly indexed online, if indexed at all. Another reason for low, non-qualified traffic is poor or no selection of key phrases for a site. For example, an investment banker writing a thesis on the likelihood of a depression may want to come up under the term 'depression' on the search engines. But research of key phrases would reveal that most people searching the word 'depression,' are searching for information about the psychological kind and not the monetary kind. It would also reveal that that phrase is too competitive for most sites to index well on it. You have to understand how people are searching and then place yourself in appropriate areas through improving site design and pursuing search engine optimization. Should I do this work myself or should I hire a professional? The answer to this question involves 3 factors: Time, interest, and money. You must know what is acceptable by the engines. Doing it wrong can get you listed poorly, and if you offend too many rules you can even be banned from certain engines. Ideally, if doing this work in-house, choose someone to be the search engine expert. Doing it right involves continual research. Hiring a web page promotion expert is not cheap. It is a focused profession and can involve a lot of customization for many particular pages in a site. But chances are, hiring someone will get you the results you were looking for and usually quicker than if you were going to do it yourself. How long does it take to get listed on the search engines? Realistically, a site embarking on search engine optimization and submission will start to see results in about 2- 3 months. Pay-per-click campaigns yield results immediately. You can begin tracking results in a couple weeks after starting an SEO campaign. The timeframe also depends on the competitive nature of your industry. What kind of guarantee should I get if I hire out this work? Anyone who tells you they guarantee a particular ranking on an engine is lying. No one can do that. Some people may have a better understanding of getting a site ranked well, but they still won't be able to guarantee a position. Web page promotion companies can only guarantee that they will give you something back if they fail to achieve desired results. You can demand a guarantee, but most companies won't offer a guarantee they cannot meet, so it is simply a peace-of-mind issue for you as the client. The best way to research a company's effectiveness is to ask for references and then call them and ask pertinent questions about their goals and their satisfaction with the firm. How important are search engines in promoting my web site? Your market determines how people find new sites. The best ways people find new sites are: What can I do right now to get myself listed better on the search engines? Pick one key phrase - not a single word. Use it on your front page in: I want to be #1 when someone types in the word... If your goal is to be #1 for anything you are probably going to drive yourself crazy - especially for a general word such as 'book', 'travel' or 'gardening.' Get specific, and you will not only get better placement, you will also get more qualified buyers. Why am I listed on some search engines but not others? There are very few free search engines any longer. Most engines are partners with other engines and chances are you are overlooking a partner engine when you are not appearing where you think you should. For example, MSN lets you submit a url to its database, but it is doubtful you will ever see your site in MSN if that is the only effort you ever made to appear there. MSN listings are actually derived from Overture and Yahoo!. The best way to keep up on partner engines is Bruce Clay's search engine relationship chart: http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginechart.pdf What is the most important search engine ? Google. When you submit to Google, you'll get the best results if first optimizing pages within your site and building up your link popularity. Ranking well in Google listings means your website will probably appear in 2 of the top 4 search engines -- AOL, and, of course, Google. To appear in MSN and Yahoo! you have to bid on Overture and/or be spidered by MSN or Yahoo!’s own engines. Why won't Yahoo! list my site ? If you are a commerce site you have to pay $299 to be in Yahoo! But to make sure they don't keep the submission fee and still reject the site, be sure there are no 'under construction' pages, no misspellings, and sites absolutely must be submitted to the correct category. In addition to the yearly $299 fee there is a per click fee of either $.15 or $.30, depending on what industry you’re in. Why don't I just make my keywords the same color as my background and repeat it one hundred times at the bottom of my site? The days of tricking and spamming engines are long gone and good riddance! Search engines no longer have patience for people trying to circumvent their rules. Many people try sneaky ways of getting into search engines and in return the search engines are retaliating by banning those sites from their databases forever. The rule of thumb is: create a site with good content and good information (preferably key-phrase focused), and you will be rewarded with good positions in search engines.
The greatest long term thing you can do for web page promotion is work to get links from other web sites. This will give you relevancy in search engines' eyes and will be its own excellent resource for traffic. These links will last for years and will continually yield good results. This is also the slow-going approach to marketing. You really can only get good links from other sites by working on them one at a time -- emailing and calling site owners and requesting exchanges. I've heard about doorway pages . What are they and should I use them? Doorway pages are basically lead-ins to the main web site. They got a bad rap in the first few years of SEO because spammers created hundreds of "doorways" to sites that looked identical and contained nothing but code and repeated content and key phrases. Engines, for the most part, are too smart now-a-days to accept these kinds of doorways and few people are dumb enough to still risk creating them. What are the most important things to consider when looking to rank well? Focus on good key phrases I've got some positions I really like . Now what do I do? Start tracking these positions and the traffic from these positions in your server web logs. Make sure you stay where you are and don't slip. Only resubmit pages that have fallen severely in ranking. Track behavior of traffic from that engine to determine if it is qualified and doing the most wanted, appropriate action on your website. What are the most common mistakes people make? Typically, sites lack focus. Companies want to come up when people type in a lot of different phrases, so they list 50 words in their keyword meta tags. Invariably this dilutes the site and they don't rank well on any words. If there are fifty words that you really want to rank well on, you should divide them up over 25 or 50 pages of your site. Then theme your site's content around your words and like-combinations of your words. If it sounds complicated, I'm afraid it is. But then, that's why we're in business. :) We hope this information has answered some of your questions. If you have any further questions, please feel free to send us email or call at (877)-251-4367. |
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