New
Search Engine Marketing Practices
New Search Engine Marketing Practices
A new study by Cyveillance shows that the Web has grown to more
than 2.1 billion documents and is growing at the rate of 7 million
pages per day. Another study by Berrier Associates indicates that
people who spend five or more hours a week online spend about 71%
of their time searching for information. That goes to show the power
search engines still wield over traffic. To keep you up to date
on what online marketing professionals are now doing to win the
search engine wars, here is a brief look at some of the latest strategies
being employed.
Pay-Per-Click Search Engines
Pay-per-click search engines are becoming an extremely effective
way to get targeted traffic to websites. Basically what happens
is that you submit your site to them and bid for a top ranking.
So for a few cents per click through, your site is ranked at the
top for your selected keyword searches. Whenever someone clicks
through to your site, your account is debited the amount of cents
you bid earlier at setup time for each click through. The most popular
pay per click search engine, the one that started it all, is GoTo.com.
The best thing about these engines is that you set the amount of
money you are willing to pay for per click through, and you know
exactly how highly your site will be ranked for your selected keywords.
It is a guaranteed way to drive traffic to your site at a price
you select. For more information, see:
(http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com)
Search Engine Demographics
Have you ever wanted to know what each of the major search engines'
visitor demographics was? Perhaps you wish to know which engine
to focus on when optimizing your pages for higher rankings, or you
want to buy banner ads and want to know where you will get the most
bang for your buck. Well, here is a list of sites that tell you
all that you need:
(http://www.cyberatlas.internet.com)
(http://www.internettrafficreport.com)
(http://www.keynote.com)
(http://www.mediametrix.com)
(http://www.netratings.com)
(http://www.nielsen-netratings.com)
(http://www.nsol.com/statistics)
(http://www.nua.ie)
(http://www.searchengineshowdown.com)
(http://www.statmarket.com)
(http://www.traffick.com)
Cloaking and Page Optimization
There are two sides to the clocking issue. Cloaking, by the way,
is using scripts that hide certain pages from browsers while giving
them out to search engines only. On one hand, according to a recent
I-Search Special Issue on cloaking, Marc Krellenstein the Senior
VP of Engineering for Northern Light said "If we find out 'your'
page is cloaked we will ban your URL and sites for life." According
to I-Search, Inktomi and AltaVista share similar sentiments towards
cloaking. On the other hand, cloaking is something that is very
commonly used by high-level web designers for legitimate reasons
such as directing users with different browser capabilities to different
pages, and also by advanced web marketers to improve search engine
rankings while hiding the high ranking HTML from competitors. Despite
the fact that most engines frown upon it and indeed do penalize
some pages that use cloaking technology, a great majority of cloaked
pages still go un-penalized, working effectively towards their goal.
One reason is that its not easy for the engines to find cloaked
pages, another is that cloaking can be very legitimate so it is
let by anyway when found. So where does that leave you? If you know
what you are doing and have a legitimate reason to use cloaking,
proceed carefully. It can be highly fruitful. If you don't know
what you are doing, it is best not to cloak your pages. In general,
it's a good idea for most webmasters to stay away from cloaking.
If you would like to know more about cloaking, see the following
pages:
(http://www.spiderhunter.com/chart/)
(http://fantomaster.com/fafaqcloak1.html)
As for page optimization (making web pages designed to rank highly
on search engines and drive the resulting traffic to the main site),
many professionals now agree that creating frame pages that have
optimized html in the tag while framing the main site is the best
way to go. This is perfectly OK by the engines when used responsibly.
If you wish to use software to rapidly create these pages, consider
using PositionWeaver PRO (www.positionweaver.com).
Correct Search Engine Submission
It is widely known now that some of the automated submission tools
do not do a good job at submitting a site to the search engines.
One major problem is that some engines do not want more than one
page submitted to them from the same domain within a 30-minute period.
That is set that way to catch spammers. And most engines do not
want the same page submitted to them within the same 24-hour period.
Now there is a tool called the Search Engine Commando that you can
use that is fully safe and easy to use. It has built in rules that
enable it to submit your pages in the same responsible and effective
manner that a professional search engine marketer would, making
sure that you will not be tagged for spamming or have your submission
ignored for failing to observe the rules. To learn more about it,
see:
(http://activemarketplace.com/w.cgi?sec-9153)
Interesting Tidbits
A new study by Cyveillance shows that the Web has grown to more
than 2.1 billion documents. It is growing at the rate of 7 million
pages per day. For details, see:
(http://www.cyveillance.com/newsroom/pressr/000710.asp)
(http://www.cyveillance.com/resources/Webstudy.pdf)
Google.com is now the largest search engine; with a full-text index
of 560 million URLs in June, plus a further 500 million URLs that
it has never actually visited but can potentially come in on a search
results set.
You may have certain pages that you need to have excluded from
search engine indexing for one reason or another. While you could
use the META robots tag to control this, many engines now ignore
that tag. Your best bet is to use a robots.txt file, which is placed
in your root folder. All major engines and many smaller ones make
use of robots.txt files. To find out more about this versatile file,
see:
(http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/norobots-rfc.html)
(http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~sxw/robots/check/)
About the Author David Gikandi (support@positionweaver.com),
CEO at SearchPositioning.com (http://www.positionweaver.com).
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