did you know ... ?

search engines generate 7% to 8% of traffic to web sites (source: statmarket 02/02)

when looking for products or services online, 28% of users type a product name into a search engine, 23% go straight to the url, 9% type a brand name into a search engine, 5% type a company name into a search engine, and 5% go to a search engine shopping channel (source: jupiter media metrix 09/01)

nine out of ten web users visit a search engine, portal or community site each month. they also revisit frequently, nearly five times per month (source: nielsen/netratings 05/01)

consumers are 5 times more likely to purchase your products after seeing search listings versus banners (source: npd 01/01)

with statistics like these, it's clear that search engine submission is an important part of any serious web site promotion and marketing campaign.

this article covers 3 major topics. feel free to jump to any topic of interest.

5 myths about search engines
some important facts about search engines
submitting to google, yahoo, msn + open directory

5 myths about search engines

there are a lot of myths about the best strategies for promoting your site with search engines. i want to consider 5 of the most prevalent myths to begin my introduction to search engine submission.

myth #1: search engine optimization no longer works

just take a look at prominent campaigns by leading search engine positioning firms (used by fortune 500 companies and others):

demonstrating the strategic value of search engine positioning (sep) and the dramatic impact a comprehensive sep campaign can produce, professional services firm iprospect™ succeeded in driving 1.3 million people to edmunds.com from search engines and directories in june 2001, attracting over 7 million visitors to the site over the past year (source: iprospect)

business online achieved a 400% increase in traffic for clients prime business systems and dreampharm, yielding an estimated 600% increase in online sales (source: business online)

the fact is that one can create special pages (often called doorway pages) that are optimized to rank well on a given search engine for a given keyword (a keyword is simply a word or phrase that people would search on to find your web site). search engines send out 'spiders' that rank your site based on algorithms between keyword frequency, prominence, weight and other factors. we can determine the statistics that the particular search engine is looking for, and then create pages that perfectly adhere to its criteria for high-ranking pages.

to keep on top of the competition, we can also analyze the competing web sites that rank highly, and craft doorway pages specifically designed to out-rank this competition. note, however, that many times the competition may also rank highly because of how many other links point to them from other sites, or because of how long they have been in the index.

myth #2: bulk submitting is the way to go

the fact of the matter is that almost 90% of all search engine traffic to most web sites comes from 3 major search engines.

ads that promise riches from submitting to 3500 search engines at once are most often just submitting your email address to sites set up for the sole purpose of collecting your email address and then sending you unsolicited email (spam). expect within the hour to be receiving lots of emails alerting you to register that .biz or .us name!

myth #3: meta tags are all that you need

many small webmaster-oriented sites give you tools to generate your own meta tags – special bits of code in your web page that tell the search engine what keywords apply to your page (using the meta keyword tag), and give the search engine a short description of your page (using the meta description tag).

however, as of 07/02, only 1 search engine – inktomi – uses the meta keyword tag at all, and most search engines currently feel that meta data is no longer trustworthy, but rather a source of confusion and spam.

new techniques for search engine submission – relying on keyword frequency, prominence, weight, and other statistics – now replace the use of meta tags, although meta tags are still added for some search engines.

myth #4: doorway pages will not work or will get you banned

some search engines have recently been condemning the use of doorway pages in positioning. but the fact is that every page on the web acts as a doorway page if it ranks on a search engine. if you do a search on any search engine, you'll find that the results are more often a targeted page within a site, rather than the site's home page. thus you can have just a couple or most all of your web pages acting as doorway pages in different ways for your site, bringing visitors directly to the page in which they are most interested.

myth #5: submitting before your site is finished lets you get ahead of the game

many search engines refuse to index you if you have the words "under construction" anywhere on your site. google goes a step farther and will not index you unless some other site links to you that is apparently unassociated with you. other engines such as hotbot drop your page from their index if no other external sites link to it. the rule is only to submit your site when it is ready for everyone to view.

some important facts about search engines

• each search engine ranks pages differently
• search engines change rapidly, and they frequently change the criteria that they use to rank their pages
• targeting the right keywords is critical
• increasing your links from other sites makes a big difference to your rankings
• human-reviewed directories are becoming more and more popular (yahoo, looksmart, and open directory), and today all limit submissions to just one most relevant category rather than two categories as some used to allow
• most search engines have started requiring payment for any commercial listing
  

submitting to google, yahoo, msn + open directory

there are 3 search engines that represent 90% of search engine use. if you submit to no others, submit to these. we are talking about yahoo (30% of all search engine traffic), google (28% of traffic), and msn (30% of traffic).

nielsen/netratings 08/02

google (www.google.com) is free. it is spider-based, which means no human ever reviews the page. this means that ideally the site you submit to google should have at least one optimized doorway page that fits google's profile of a high-ranking page. typically, you would want to target at least 2 keywords.

facts about google:

• all the results that yahoo shows in its web page listings come from google
  
• google powers all main results in aol + netscape
  
• visitors can choose to search the open directory (see below)
  
• google currently indexes approximately 2.5 billion documents and logs about 150 million searches per day
  
• google will not index a site that does not have at least one external link pointing to it
  

yahoo (www.yahoo.com) charges $299 for a review of your site by one of their reviewers within 7 days. note that they do not guarantee that they will list your site in their directory for this money. however, there are tips and techniques to ensure one's entry into the yahoo directory. we can place you in a category and submit your site with a carefully formulated and targeted description of your business.

facts about yahoo:

• yahoo uses google to supply results for both its web page listings and as backup results
  

msn (www.msn.com) is arguably the most important search engine, given the dominance of the windows operating system and the close ties between all microsoft products & services. it returns primarily human-reviewed results based on looksmart, also supplying a small percentage of results from its own editors and, if no other results are found, some spider-based results.

facts about msn:

• relies almost totally on results from looksmart
• boasts over a billion searches per month
  

open directory (www.dmoz.org) is free. its enormous human-compiled directory is comparable to the yahoo directory, and it is the directory search option on many popular sites, including google, aol + netscape.