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Web site promotion and search engine optimisation specialists |
...Web Site PromotionSEARCH ENGINE PROMOTION The ever expanding web, as noted above, poses a major problem for small businesses - even if they are properly indexed by search engines, they are often lost at the bottom of lists of thousands of matching query results. The search engines do not cover the entire WWW, and appear to be unable to keep up with the rate of expansion at present. Directories such as Yahoo! (which has the highest audience reach of all search facilities - 62% according to MMXI's latest figures - M16) provide even less coverage of the web (only just over one million sites listed) and therefore rely more on quality rather than quantity. Clearly both search engines and directories are concerned largely with satisfying searchers' needs, and doubtless find there are diminishing returns on increasing the size of their indexes beyond a critical limit. Most people only want one good answer in response to a query, so there is little incentive for search engines to expand their coverage, especially for popular keywords when they are already delivering excessive lists of matches. Search engines are powerful tools for driving traffic to web sites - but only for those in the top 20 or 30 results for a given keyword search, as anyone below this is effectively not seen. The problem of ranking highly is compounded by a bias imposed by the search engines. Lawrence and Giles (33) found that search engines are more likely to index USA sites than non USA sites, commercial rather than educational sites, and particularly favour those sites which have external links to them. They found sites with external links had up to eight times higher probability of being listed than sites without links. Further, some engines such as Google and DirectHit make extensive use of 'popularity' measures to apply a relevance weighting to the order of results. This is clearly an attempt to select sites which appear to be authoritative on a given topic because of the number of other sites referring to them. This results in a tendency for popular pages to become more popular (because they are more visible), and new or unlinked pages not to be indexed, or buried at the bottom of a long list. As Lawrence and Giles conclude "this may delay or even prevent the widespread visibility of new high quality information". The author emailed some of the major search engines regarding the
last point and asked if this issue was being addressed. Some replies
were received, but none answered the question. Search engines are
now adopting a much more commercial stance, and in addition to selling
banner ad space, they are now selling keywords. This can be on an
auction basis (notably GoTo.com where bidding starts at a penny
per click, but prices can go up to $5 per click for a good position),
or for a particular keyword (e.g. RealNames, $100 per year for a
RealName). PayPerClick SearchEngines (S5) lists and reviews most of the search engines selling keywords. Many directories and engines also offer an accelerated web site submission service for a fee (e.g. Yahoo! $199) . They still offer free registration, but it can take two to three months to get listed if at all, and rumours abound that some are so overwhelmed with new submissions that the free ones can be permanently overlooked. Search engine optimisation is a specialised activity in which web pages are manipulated to achieve high search engine rankings. At the simplest level this involves configuring meta tags and text on each page to meet search engine ranking criteria for keyword frequency, density, prominence and location. These criteria vary from engine to engine and are constantly being updated by engines in an effort to deflect frivolous or irrelevant submissions, and to improve relevance for searchers. In addition, 'doorway' and 'hallway' pages, and multi-domain strategies are used to optimise ranking. These strategies can be very effective, but take time and patience to implement. Search engine optimisation is becoming ever more complex and unpredictable because of the expanding volume of documents on the WWW, and because of search engine tactics. As Marckini the CEO of a major search engine optimisation company, iProspect, is quoted as saying by Greenberg (22), "three years ago if you put a keyword meta tag containing five words on a page, you'd get a ranking for most of those words." Today this is not possible, and meta tags have been abused so much by promoters, that they have much less influence now on ranking results. Marckini reflects the views of many in the search engine industry when he is quoted in the same article by Greenberg, as saying that search engine positioning is a very iterative process, and takes at least three months to begin to show results - their minimum customer contract being one year. In order to make effective use of search engines, it is becoming increasingly necessary to use paid for services such as: - 'express' registration of a new site (e.g. $199 for LookSmart) - purchase keywords - purchase word ads (e.g. Google's new AdWord at $15 CPM) that appear next to a list of results - purchase keyword linked banner ad space (e.g. $30 CPM or more for the major portals) Of course it is essential that any new web site is registered with the search engines and directories, though some rely more on following external links both to find and to rank a site - as confirmed by the experiment in Section 1 of this project for Google. Sites should be re-registered about every month in order to ensure they are not forgotten. The percentage of surfers estimated to have visited each search engine during the month is shown in Fig. 4.1, and gives some idea of the relative popularity of these sites. Some of these figures are heavily inflated by visits to non - search related services though, especially the portal sites. Similar measurements made by SuperStats (S9) differ wildly from MMXI's due to differences in methods used - e.g. SuperStats show Yahoo! with 40.8% reach, AOL with 10.0%, MSN with 10.0%, and Lycos with 2.2%. So caution must be exercised when dealing with this data.
A survey of Workz.com (52) members found that the average time spent per week on site submission was 60 minutes, and those who spent less than this were rarely able to influence their rankings. The top twenty search engines and directories are claimed by many (but no firm data can be found to confirm this) to be responsible for over 90% of all search traffic. Certainly for business purposes, these major engines and any country specific search engines are all that are necessary to submit to. It is interesting to note the network of partnerships and alliances amongst the major engines - see Fig. 4.2.
This illustrates the importance of some engines/directories who feed many other players with their database information - e.g. Open Directory Project, LookSmart, and Inktomi. Also, DirectHit, known as the 'popularity' engine, feeds data, but more importantly manipulates results for other engines according to its record of which pages have been selected before in searches. Any search engine strategy must therefore focus not only on the most popular search engines but also on the most influential. It is worth considering use of search engine optimisation techniques, which can be very effective (depending on rarity of keywords appropriate for the business, and the degree of competition for these, and skill in implementation). Optimisation can be time consuming, or expensive if using professional services. It should be considered only as a part of a balanced promotional plan incorporating other activities.
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