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Seek and thou shall find
UK-Netmarketing Weekly Round-up - August 18, 2000

Search engines are a regular feature of most Internet's users destinations, which makes them a target, in one way or another, for every online marketer. Trouble is, they're complex beasts with many different angles of attack.

Roger Doddy, asked the UKNM list for some advice, "Can anyone point me towards a web site that gives guidance on effective search engine registration and the practical steps involved in the process? I assume that the big engines are just trawling the web constantly and that provided you have the right key words in your sites meta tag description they will eventually find you ... how do you improve your position on any search list that is generated?"

Nikki Pilkington replied, "Two great places to start your search engine education are: http://www.searchengineforums.com and http://www.searchenginewatch.com ... As far as the search engines picking up your site - this used to be the case with search engines such as Alta Vista, but the best way to ensure pick up now is to submit by hand yourself. It's easy and it's free - look for the 'add url' button on any search engine."

Matt Blake added, "You should normally submit at least one page (preferably the home page) of your website. Just one bit of advice: don't assume anything with search engines, they are the most infuriating contraptions known to mankind and will confound at every opportunity..."

If time is of the essence and you have the budget available, "You can also outsource to agencies that specialise in this field. Range greatly in ability to actually deliver but worth exploring", suggested Jens Bachem.

With dozens of search engines and directories already online and more appearing every day, it can be hard to see the wood for the trees. Ben Ellis suggested some prioritisation, "Concentrate your submissions on the major search engines such as Altavista, Excite, Lycos, Google, etc. I strongly recommend submitting by hand and actually visiting the 'Add URL' pages of each engine. Multiple submit packages such as Web Position Gold, etc are quite good but you can never quite tell how the search engines will receive their submissions. Some ban submissions from certain submit sites and packages. These major engines are important as they make up about 80% of all internet searches, plus there's about 15 of them so it doesn't really take that long."

Of course, getting the URL into a search engine is only half the battle, next the courageous marketer has to ensure the website can be found. Getting a search engine to find the right phrases involves the mystical art of meta tags.

Ben Ellis offered some more advice, "... make sure you have a title, description, and keywords tag. This is just the beginning though, thorough keyword research is vital. What do your customers look for when trying to find your product or service? Ask customers, look at your site logs, check out the GoTo keyphrase tool. Target keyphrases NOT individual words. [If] you've got 'consultancy' as one of your keywords, what kind? Will anyone type in 'consultancy' to find your site? No. Try 'ebusiness consultancy', add focus to your keyphrases. Have a fresh look at what you provide and then find new keyphrases to target. Look at competitors to see what they use. Do a search and then check out who's ranking No.1.

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