E-MARKETING(INTERNET MARKETING)

Chapter – 3

Search Engine Optimization

BY: Dr. Showkat Hussain Gani

Overview A search engine is a service where internet users can go to

the search engine web site and search for web sites that interest them by inputting keywords. The search engine then displays the results of their search starting with the web sites that best meet the search criteria down to the web sites that least fit the search criteria.

Search engines are becoming ever more popular especially when you consider how many web sites there are on the internet today and most users have limited time to find what they are looking for. Search engine optimisation is the process of getting your web site address or URL as close as possible to the top of the search results when someone using the search engines is looking for the products you sell.

Search Engines

Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engines

Search Engines and Directories

A directory site is one that contains manually compiled categories of Web sites, whereas a search engine uses automated spiders to search the Web for content and organize it by keywords, with little regard for the true category under which each site should fall.

Search Engines

Search Engines and Directories User's Point of View

Over the years there has been plenty of debate over whether search engines are directories and vice versa. From the user's point of view, it would appear that all directories could be considered search engines since they all have an input box to search the content of the site, regardless of the method of acquiring data.

E-Marketing Point of View

From an E-Marketing point of view, we are more concerned with the method by which data is added and ranked, as this will determine how we adjust our placement strategy for each. It is the intent of this lesson to optimize placement in the search results for search engines and directories.

Blurring the Lines

It is important to note that many search engines get some of their results from other search engines and directories, many of which are owned by or partnered with each other. The dynamics of these relationships are ever-changing, but a visit to www.SearchEngineWatch.com can update you on the current state.

Search Engines

Can the Search Engine War Be Won? Many people believe that great placement in the search engines is a lottery at

best. For example, the authors of Web Marketing & Project Management said in their book, "I don't believe this game can be won."

For argument's sake, let's do a quick test to see if, in fact, search engine placement is possible. By clicking on a link below, the corresponding search engine box will appear. Do a search for "Webmaster Certification" in any of the search engines listed below. Once there you should find "Webmaster Certification Online" and/or "WebYoda" listed in the top five, probably both in the top 5 with one of them listed #1.

Is WebmasterCertification.com the luckiest company alive when it comes to search engine placement? Not likely. The truth is, we have applied the strategies we are about to discuss in order to achieve the placement we currently enjoy. Your results will likely vary, however, as you can clearly see, these strategies are proven effective.

Most people think search engine placement is a lottery at best. Many who do attempt top 10 placement without the appropriate training often fail miserably. This leaves the door open even wider for those of us who are persistent and trained correctly.

Search Engines

Search Engine Basics

Good placement in search engines results from a combination of preparation and opportunity (aka LUCK). Search engines claim you can get results in as few as 24 hours, yet it can often take 2 months before most search engines cycle through their backlog of new entries. With 90% of the sites indexed in search engines being junk, getting good exposure via search engines is difficult. Use the tips in this section to improve your placement odds.

Search Engines

Search Engine Tips 1. Submit Web site to search engine

(http://google.com/addurl).

2. Use keywords in the content near the top of the document.

3. Keywords placed inside clickable link text ranks higher.

4. Use descriptive Web page titles.

5. Use a descriptive URL, for example:www.webmastercertification.com/webmaster-courses.cfm.

6. Encourage other sites to link to yours.

Search Engines

Search Engine Tips Purchase alternate Web names, point them all to your Web site,

then submit those names.

Use Meta Tags correctly

Visiting your own link in the results of some search engines can improve your ranking.

Avoid frames, Web sites using frames can not be picked up by all search engine spiders.

Avoid keyword spamming, any excessive use of keywords can hurt your placement in the search engines.

Use an entry page through which people can access your Web site, but is optimized with the rules above, thus more desirable to the search engines.

Search Engines

Search Engine Urban Legends The list below contains factors that are presumed to improve search

engine placement but typically do not.

1. Using popular search terms unrelated to your content does yield more traffic but not quality traffic.

2. Search engines are not case sensitive. Searching on "webmaster" or "Webmaster" will yield the same results.

3. The order that keywords are typed into a search engine does not affect the results.

4. Placing keyword content on a Web page that is the same color as the background will hide it from users, but search engines will often interpret it as spam.

5. Meta Tags are presumed to be the key to high rankings; however with many search engines, they are primarily used to determine what words to index a site with, and not as much how high to rank it.

Search Engines

Hidden Content Alternative It is true that content that is the same color

as the background color can be detected as spam by the search engines; however, two colors do not have to be exactly the same to appear exactly the same. For example, while the color white is "#FFFFFF", the color "#FEFCFD" is not white, although it visually will appear so.

Another technique would be to set the background to the color's text name ("white"), and then color the content with the color's number ("#FFFFFF"). It is rumored, however, that this practice is more likely to be detected as spam.

Search Engines

Keyword Search Terms Keyword search terms are either single words or multiple words

that are typed into a search engine. Web developers typically put these words in the title, meta tags, and content of the Web pages to improve the likelihood that the pages will be found by search engines.

One typical oversight is to put all the single search words in to the meta tag as single keywords separated by commas. As it turns out, the focus should be on multiple keyword terms. For example, a user interested in Webmaster courses is likely to type "Webmaster Certification" or "Webmaster Training" into a search engine.

First make a list of every keyword search term you feel is relative to your business. Next go to inventory.overture.com and search on each of the original terms. Look in the search results for a section called "Refine Suggstions to narrow you search." This tells you other keyword search terms on which users have searched. Add all that you feel are truly relative to the list for your business.

Search Engines

Doorway pages Doorway pages are Web pages that point to

other pages in a Web site but the Web site pages do not point to them. These pages can be individually optimized for each search engine and each search term.

The main example for doorway pages was deep linking. Recall that deep linking is the act of making special pages that advertising can point to so that the effectiveness of the advertising campaign can be tracked.

Search Engines

Doorway pages Keyword Optimized Pages

Keyword optimized pages are pages where each page in a set of pages focuses on one keyword search term. The keyword meta tag should only include the target keyword and the description meta tag should include the target keyword in a sentence. Next, the title should be worded to contain the target keyword term, preferably twice, but never more than twice. For example, we might use the following title for a doorway page about "Webmaster Training."

Webmaster Training - Quality Online Webmaster Training 25% Off

Misspelled Keywords Pages

Another interesting and effective strategy is to build gateway pages that are optimized for misspelled keyword terms. First, choose your most effective keyword terms, then misspell them using the following patterns.

Examples: ebmaster Training WWebmaster Training eWbmaster Training Wbmaster Training Weebmaster Training Wbemaster Training Wemaster Training Webbmaster Training Wembaster Training

Search Engines

Doorway pages

Link the Gateway Pages

Assuming you have hundreds of gateway pages, it would be neither practical nor advisable to submit all the pages to the search engines individually. It would be very time consuming and would likely be detected as spam.

Alternatively, you can make a set of hidden links to your target keyword pages from one page within your main site, then on each target page put hidden links to the misspelled pages for that target keyword. Once complete, the gateway pages become a connected part of your Web site and when your site is spidered by the search engines, these pages are likely to be included.

Search Engines

Search Engine Popularity

About the Different Search Engines

You have integrated your keyword terms into your Web pages using the techniques previously discussed. But this only prepares your pages for what the search engines like to see. The goal now is to convince the search engines that the visitors to your site are satisfied as well.

Many of today's search engines incorporate methods to track the popularity of links in the search results returned. The more popular a link is, the higher in the rankings the site will appear. We will discuss different techniques next and how to make them work for you.

Search Engines

Link Popularity (off page) The first method search engines use to grade a Web site is how

many Web sites point to them. Hence if your site has 100 other sites linking to you, but your competitor has only 10, your site will rank higher in some search engines. As a byproduct, every site that links to you is a potential entry point for your customers.

There are many options to getting linked, most of which are byproducts of other E-Marketing techniques discussed throughout this course. Some examples include business directory sites, Web awards, Internet top 50 sites, resource sites, banner sites, blind links, affiliate links, free Web sites and reciprocal links with other non-competing Web sites.

Once you are linked by any of these methods, it is advantageous to submit the sites that point to you to the search engines as many of them may not be indexed. This not only tells the search engines that they exist but also that they link to you.

Search Engines

Link PopularityBlind Links

Blind links are links in a Web page that are not visible to the visitor, but visible to the search engines. It is possible to put these links in other pages that you create and point them all back to your main site. This can be accomplished by making very small 1x1 graphics that display the same color as the background of the page. Simply name the graphic(s) something meaningful like "webmastertraining.gif" and point the link to the corresponding Web site.

Affiliate Links

Affiliate links are links to your site where the site containing the link to your site earns money either by people visiting your site or by producing sales. For example, WebmasterCertification.com has an affiliate program that pays 5% of all course sales that come from the affiliate site. As a byproduct, the affiliate sites are linked to you and can be submitted to search engines to improve your popularity.

Free Web Site

Another option is to create free Web sites at places like www.angelfire.com/ and have a link to your site from them. The problem with this idea is that the page you are submitting is not likely to be a very useful page, thus you are improving your link popularity at the expense of submitting dead weight to the search engines.

Search Engines

Click Popularity Click popularity is a measure of how often your link in search results is

clicked. In some search engines, the more often your link is clicked, the higher your site ranks in the search results. Thus, in popularity-driven search engines, you can search on your keyword terms, then go through the search results clicking on every link within the results that links to your site. Over time this will improve your position in these search engines.

The more savvy search engines keep track of how much time you spent at a given link, this is referred to as popularity stickiness. If you click on the first link in the search results, then back up and choose another link immediately, the search engine assumes you did not like the first result very much.

A good strategy for you is to set your browser's home page to the search engine you would like to target, and each time you open your browser you search on your keywords, click on your link, then leave that search engine alone for a while (the exact delay time is unknown).

Search Engines

Click Popularity Focus on multiple search terms

One of the biggest oversights in the search engine placement wars is focusing all your energy on one really good search term. You need to target multiple keyword terms, ones that have proven to be good search terms relative to the people doing the searching. WebYoda made this mistake early on as we did not focus on the search term "Web Design Training" as much as we should have. However, with your help in the next exercise, you can help correct this oversight.

Visiting Competitors Sites

It is often valuable to visit the competition's Web site. Remember that if you click on their links, you are improving their popularity as well. Instead, manually type the URL for the competition Web site into your browser location bar. This will get you to their site without giving them click popularity credit.

Search Engines

Popularity Search Engines How to Identify Popularity Search Engines

You can assume that all search engines that allow you to submit Web sites are monitoring link popularity at some level. However, click popularity is not as common. The most obvious way to know a search engine potentially uses click popularity is if the links within the results visit their server before heading to the destination site. Meaning if you put the mouse over a link, the status bar at the bottom of your browser will show the link pointing back to the search engine.

Identifying The Ones That Don't Want to Be Found

One might assume that if you put your mouse over a link in search results and the status bar shows the true URL to the destination site, that the search engine does not use click popularity. However, this may not be the case. Some search engines will purposely set the onMouseover text to display the destination URL, but have the link set to visit their server first before going to the destination site. This can be detected by creating a shortcut to the link then viewing the properties of the shortcut to see where the link really goes.

Search Engines

Popularity Search EnginesList Of Popularity Search Engines

The following search engines are believed to use click popularity. Some of these get their results from the same source. For example, www.directhit.com provides search results for www.askjeeves.com. It is still assumed to be advantageous to visit all sites, whether they are related or not, to improve click popularity.

Click Popularity Search Engines  1) http://www.yahoo.com  2) http://www.google.com  3) http://www.altavista.com  4) http://www.excite.com  5) http://www.lycos.com  6) http://www.msn.com  7) http://www.aol.com  8) http://www.askjeeves.com  9) http://www.nbci.com 10) http://www.iwon.com

Search Engines

Hand-Reviewed Directories Hand-reviewed directories are ones where a real person looks at each site

before it is added. This means it is not a good idea to submit the same site over and over again as it may be detected as spam. In addition, submitting any or all sub-pages of a Web site is discouraged.

Open-Source DirectoriesOpen-source directories like dmoz.com and NBCI.com, are ones where anyone who gets

approved can become an editor for the directory. Dmoz.com for example, has over 30,000 editors. Once you are an editor you can submit Web sites for approval at will and they are typically approved within 48 hours.

Proprietary DirectoriesProprietary directories are ones in which the editors are hired by the directory company. This

means it is very hard to influence the inclusion of your site within these directories, the time delay for inclusion can be months, and you are not notified if the site is rejected.

Pay-Per-Review DirectoriesPay-per-review directories are also proprietary directories. Basically, for a fee of typically

$199 you are guaranteed your submission will be reviewed within 48 hours. If your submission is approved, you will be immediately added to the directory and you should start appearing within the directory within a week. If you receive an email of approval, but do not find your site in the directory within two weeks, you are encouraged to call to confirm placement.

Search Engines

Pay-Per-Click Directories Pay-per-click search engines are search engines where the listings are

ordered by the highest bidder per keyword term. The minimum bid is $0.05 US, and you only pay if someone clicks on your link. The two major pay-per-click sites are www.findwhat.com and www.overture.com.

www.findwhat.com is the second largest pay-per-click site. They have a review policy, so your submissions do not appear until they have been reviewed (about 24 hours). One of the neatest features findwhat.com has is the ability to get groups of keyword term statistics. Meaning that if you query on "Webmaster," it will return the top 50 most frequently typed search terms. This is very valuable for determining what keywords on which to bid.

www.overture.com is by far the largest pay-per-click site. They are a review site as well, meaning, once you submit your sites, they must be reviewed by their editors before they are added. This takes about 48 hours, but ensures the quality of the listings.

Search Engines

Metacrawlers Search Engine Metacrawlers are search engines that return

the best results of the other search engines. In theory, the Metacrawler results should collectively be better, however, at closer inspection you find that a lot of the listings are also pay-per clicks. Meaning, most metacrawlers are used to capture affiliate dollars from the pay-per-click networks they list.

This does strengthen the argument to use the pay-per-click sites since if you are #1 in the pay-per-click sites, you are likely to enjoy top placement in the metacrawlers as well.

Search Engines

Standard Search Engines www.yahoo.com www.google.com www.msn.com www.lycos.com www.hotbot.com www.dmoz.com www.alltheweb.com www.aol.com www.netscape.com www.allthesites.com www.webcrawler.com www.northernlight.com www.altavista.com www.excite.com

Search Engines

Pay Per Click Search Engines

www.overture.com www.findwhat.com www.kanoodle.com

Search Engines

Mirror Search Engines

www.askjeeves.com www.supercybersearch.com www.att.net www.earthlink.com www.compuserve.com www.go.com www.Infoseek.com www.opendirectory.net

Search Engines

Meta Search Engines www.metacrawler.com www.dogpile.com www.gohip.com www.thebighub.com www.mamma.com www.whatuseek.com www.monstercrawler.com www.go2net.com www.canada.com www.search.com www.searchalot.com www.iwon.com

Search Engines