The Honest Truth
About Search Engines
There's a pretty good chance that we can save you literally hundreds
or thousands of hours worth of research, work, and frustration when it
comes to search engines - and using them to promote your site. You see,
in terms of marketing effectiveness search engines are highly over rated.
And most marketers pay them too much attention.
The absolute truth of the matter is that for most online businesses,
search engines are definitely not the most effective way to promote a
web site. In fact, depending primarily on the products and services you're
marketing they can be almost useless.
Don't take that the wrong way, many targeted prospects discover our web
sites at the major search engines. And we'll show you how to profit from
them too. But before we do, you need to know the truth about search engines
- and how they should fit into your overall Internet marketing strategy.
It's quite possible that they won't be a top priority, because search
engines are just one little part of a much larger picture.
No doubt you've heard search engine fanatics shouting things like, "90%
of your traffic will come from search engines!" Well guess what?
That's total BS. The only way that 90% of your traffic will come from
search engines is if you listen to these people, and do nothing to promote
your site but submit to search engines all day long.
It's a proven fact that most searchers rarely look past the top ten or
twenty listings, so to begin with you need a really good ranking in order
to generate a decent number of visitors from search engines. This presents
the first big problem with relying on them for web site traffic - the
competition can be extremely fierce.
If you're targeting a small niche market competition may not be a big
problem. With a modest amount of effort you may find that your web sites
get listed in the top ten or twenty positions at the major search engines,
generally because there aren't 50,000 other marketers to compete with.
But what if your market is a little bigger?
It's a classic Catch-22 really. As the number of web surfers searching
for a particular keyword or keyword phrase increases, so does the competition
for their attention.
If your intention is to attract web surfers who are searching for things
like "software," "gifts," "games," "chat,"
"jobs," "music," "free stuff," or any other
popular topics, you need to realize that you'll be competing with thousands
of other Internet marketers for just a few top rankings. After all, how
many "Top 20" listings can there be?
To make matters worse, search engines don't all rank web pages the same
way. In fact they are all quite different. Here are a few examples:
Using good meta tags in your pages will normally give your ranking a
boost on HotBot and Infoseek, but not on the other search engines.
AltaVista, Infoseek, and Lycos will index image "alt" tags
which can affect the way your page is ranked, but other search engines
don't.
AltaVista and Infoseek are case-sensitive, but Excite, Lycos and Webcrawler
are not. And HotBot is somewhere inbetween.
Most search engines make use of "stop words," which are common
words that are ignored in searches -- but Infoseek doesn't.
Infoseek and Lycos use "stemming" which means that a search
for "swim" might also turn up "swimmer". But not on
the others it won't.
Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, and Web Crawler will give your ranking a boost
if lots of other sites link to yours - but AltaVista and HotBot will not.
Meta refresh tags and invisible text will result in a penalty on AltaVista,
but Excite doesn't seem to care. The rest have mixed feelings.
Each search engine places a different priority on each of the criteria
used to rank web pages, and they change their procedures often.
And that's just the beginning. After all of your hard work trying to
get everything right, a page that you manage to get into the famed "Top
10" on Infoseek might be listed #100 on AltaVista - and a listing
in the 100th spot is almost worthless.
The bottom line is that in order to achieve a high ranking on each of
the major search engines, you'll need to create a separate web page that
is optimized for each. If there are five keywords or keyword phrases that
you're targeting, you're looking at creating and maintaining at least
thirty different versions of one web page.
Is it worth the time and effort? If you're promoting an adult site it
might be, because "sex" is the most popular search term with
millions of queries per day. But if you're selling anything else there
are more effective ways to spend your time - especially if yours is a
small business with just a few employees who are already overworked.
And that's only half of the story. An even bigger problem with search
engines is that unless you're dealing with a really popular theme, you
just won't get that many visitors from them. Even with a favorable "Top
10" listing at all of the major search engines, most businesses will
not receive enough traffic to generate significant profits.
We're talking about daily visitor counts in the five-figure or higher
range - the kind of traffic that 99% of sites can't get from the search
engines.
Stick to basic web page optimization strategies that everyone should
take advantage of while designing a web site. Then, as you go along you'll
need to decide how important search engine rankings are to you and your
business. Remember, you need to spend your time wisely.
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Originally published in IMC's Internet Marketing Chronicles.
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