Published in the March edition of Computer Link Magazine

Great!  You’ve just spent tens, or more likely, hundreds of thousands of dollars on your new eBusiness initiative.  Now, how are your customers and prospects going to find it?  At first most of your traffic will be generated the old fashioned way, through word of mouth and traditional marketing efforts. These methods do a great job of reaching your existing customer base, but to be truly successful in today’s economy, you are going to need to reach further to find new customers and markets.

One of the best marketing tools available on the Internet is Search Engines. Search engines are the number one way people find web sites.  According to an Intelliquest study, 46% of people find web sites using one or a combination of many of these search sites. Search engines can vary substantially from one to another and everybody seems to have his or her own favorite. Recent studies have shown, however, that most of the search engine traffic goes through a limited number of sites.  Yahoo! is the most used search engine with MSN and AOL hot on it’s heels according to Media Metrix, October 2000. Another great thing about many search engines is that they offer to list and link to your site for free.

So, it seems pretty simple right? All you need to do is identify the top search engines and submit your site and the traffic will start pouring in. Well, it’s not quite that simple. Webtop (www.webtop.com) reported in a 2000 study that 2/3’s of web surfers get frustrated when searching on the web. Another portion of the study showed that users get frustrated after as little as 5 minutes of searching. Therefore, it not only becomes important to be listed in search engines, but also to be listed in the first page or two of the search results. 

Before getting into how to get listed, I think it’s important to understand how search engines work.

How Search Engines Work

The majority of search engines work on a fairly simple premise. You send a message to the Search Engine letting them know you have a new or updated site for them to review and the search engine electronically reads the content of your site and lists your site based on the most prominent content on your site. Then, when a visitor types in a keyword that matches your content, your site will come up in the list. This system worked really well in the early days of the Internet, when there were only a million or so pages on the web. However, today there are millions of pages added to the web each day. Search engines very quickly started to have thousands of pages listed for each keyword. So, a new system was established. Rather than relying on the content of your site, there was a new type of code you could add to your site, called a META tag, that enabled you to list the keywords you wanted to be listed under. By placing a series of META tags in the code of your pages you were able to control what words you were listed under. However, this system also failed when people realized that they could move their site to the top of the list by repeating the same word over and over again, known as search engine spamming.  Another common misuse of META tags included putting in the names of your competitors, so that your site would show up when people searched for your competition. Once again the search engines were showing too many results to be truly useful.

Since then, search engines have evolved into a much more complex system. Most search engines use a combination of several elements of your pages to prioritize the order of their listings. Each search engine does it a little differently. You can usually find out how by reading each search engine’s submission instructions, but the core elements are usually based on META tags, Comment Fields, Page Titles and content. 

Getting listed

By now, I imagine this is starting to sound pretty confusing and complex.  Well, it is, but by following a few simple guidelines you should be able to enhance your placement in the search results and begin to attract new prospects. 

Know where you want to be

The first step towards being successful is knowing where you want your site to show up. Look at search engines as part of your marketing plan and try to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about how they would search for you. Better yet, ask your customers and prospects for a list of words they would use to try to find you and don’t forget to check where your competitors are listed.

Understand the search engine requirements

Find out more about the top search engines and get an understanding of how they prioritize their lists. 

Optimize all the elements on your pages

Focus on your home page first.  Make sure the words you want to be listed under appear in your copy, titles, comments, and META Tags. Don’t forget to include your product names, as well as your company name. 

Don’t waste your money on discount submission services

Services that submit your site to a large number of search engines at a very low cost are usually ineffective. Take the time to manually submit your sites, particularly to the top search engines.

Check your results

Once you’ve submitted your site, don’t forget about it. After a few weeks, go back and search for your keywords. See where you show up and then optimize your page elements again and re-submit your site.

Monitor your position regularly

Continue to check search results and optimize on a regular basis to ensure you maintain your position.

Search engines can be a very important part of your marketing mix and are a very effective way of bringing traffic to your site. Just remember, like any marketing effort, it’s an ongoing process that needs to be treated like any other part of your strategic marketing plans.