Search Engines - Introduction
A Vital Site Promotion Tool

With so many billions of publicly available pages on the Internet - and still growing fast - most of us are dependent on Search Engines to find the information we want.

The amount of information out there can be overwhelming, but if handled carefully it is a priceless resource - for organisations and individuals alike.

Search Engines are a powerful promotional tool - not only useful for finding information that can be valuable to the business, but as a marketing channel. Note the difference between Search Engines and Directories - see definition in the panel on the right.

We strongly recommend that search engines are used only as part of a balanced and coherent promotional plan. Reliance on search engines exclusively for promotion is very dangerous - not recommended.

Your customers and prospects use the Internet, and many rely on Search Engines to locate potential suppliers.

A Consult-X survey confirms that search engines are still the most popular means of finding new web sites.

Most visitors only bother to look through the first 20 or 30 search results before deciding which web site(s) to view. Most searches produce thousands or millions of results. So unless your web site is listed within the top 20 - 30 returns for a particular keyword or phrase - you're lost!

Getting into that top 30 position is a highly competitive business, and it takes a lot more than just registering with the engines.

Making effective use of Search Engines as part of a promotional strategy is a specialist skill. It is important to search engine optimise your web site and to formally register with the appropriate engines - if you want to get any traffic from them.

You may also choose to use 'search engine doorway' pages to improve your ranking.

An overview of search engines as business tools is available in our search engine discussion paper.