Top Search Engine

Ok, so you may know how the search engines work and you may
know that you need to be listed by them, but do you know
which engines get you more bang for the buck? In this
week’s installment, we will review the top search engines on
the Internet today.
************************************************************
Google
Google has increased in popularity tenfold the past several
years. They have gone from beta testing, to becoming the
Internet's largest index of web pages in a very short time.
Their spider, affectionately named "Googlebot", crawls the
web and provides updates to Google's index
about once a
month.

Google.com began as an academic search engine. Google, by
far, has a very good algorithm of ranking pages returned
from a result, probably one of the main reasons it has
become so popular over the years. Google has several methods
which determine page rank in returned searches.

************************************************************
Yahoo

Yahoo! is one of the oldest web directories and portals on
the Internet today, and the site went live in August of
1994. Yahoo! is a 100% human edited directory, and provides
secondary search results using Google.

Yahoo! is also one of the largest traffic generators around,
as far as web directories and search engines go.
Unfortunately, however, it is also one of the most difficult
to get listed in, unless of course you pay to submit your
site. Even if you pay it doesn't guarantee you will get
listed.

Either way, if you suggest a URL, it is "reviewed" by a
Yahoo! editor, and if approved will appear in the next index
update.

************************************************************
AltaVista

Many who have access to web logs may have seen a spider
named 'scooter' accessing their pages. Scooter used to be
AltaVista's robot. However, since the Feb 2001 site update,
a newer form of Scooter is now crawling the web. Whichever
spider AltaVista uses, it is one of the largest search
engines on the net today, next to Google.

It will usually take several months for AltaVista to index
your entire site, although the past few months scooter
hasn't been deep crawling too well. Unlike Google, AltaVista
will only crawl and index 1 link deep, so it takes a good
amount of time to index your site depending on how large
your site is.

AltaVista gets most of its results from its own index,
however they do pull the top 5 results of each search from
Overture (formerly Goto).

************************************************************
Inktomi

Inktomi's popularity grew several years ago as they powered
the secondary search database that had driven Yahoo. Since
then, Yahoo as switched to using Google as their secondary
search and backend database, however Inktomi is just as
popular now, as they were several years ago, if not more so.
Their spiders are named "Slurp", and different versions of
Slurp crawls the web many different times throughout the
month, as Inktomi powers many sites search results. There
isn't much more to Inktomi then that. Slurp puts heavy
weight on Title and description tags, and will rarely deep
crawl a site. Slurp usually only spider’s pages that are
submitted to its index.

Inktomi provides results to a number of sites. Some of these
are America Online, MSN, Hotbot, Looksmart, About, Goto,
CNet, Geocities, NBCi, ICQ and many more.

************************************************************
Lycos

Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the Internet
today, next to Altavista and Yahoo. Their spider, named
"T-Rex", crawls the web and provides updates to the Lycos
index from time to time. The FAST crawler provides results
for Lycos in addition to its own database.

The Lycos crawler does not weigh META tags to heavily,
instead it relies on its own ranking algorithm to rank pages
returned in results. The URL, META title, text headings, and
word frequency are just a few of the methods Lycos uses to
rank pages. Lycos does support pages with Frame content.
However, any page that isn't at least 75 words in content is
not indexed.

************************************************************
Excite

Excite has been around the web for many years now. Much more
of a portal than just simply a search engine, Excite used to
be a fairly popular search engine, until companies such as
Google seemed to have dominated the search engine market. As
of recently, Excite no longer accepts submissions of URL's,
and appears to no longer spider. To get into the Excite
search results, you need to be either listed with Overture
or Inktomi.

************************************************************
Looksmart

Getting a listed with Looksmart could mean getting a good
amount of traffic to your site. Looksmart's results appear
in many search engines, including AltaVista, MSN, CNN, and
many others.

Looksmart has two options to submit your site. If your site
is generally non-business related, you can submit your site
to Zeal (Looksmart's sister site ), or if you are a
business, you can pay a fee to have your site listed. Either
method will get you listed in Looksmart and its partner
sites if you are approved.

Once you have submitted your site, and it is approved for
listing it will take up to about 7 days for your site to be
listed on Looksmart and its partner sites.

************************************************************
AOL Search

America Online signed a multiyear pact with Google for Web
search results and accompanying ad-sponsored links, ending
relationships with pay-for-performance service Overture
Services and Inktomi, its algorithmic search provider of
nearly three years


Take some time to register with these search engines as soon
as possible and watch the traffic grow.

optimizing Your Site to Get Top Billing at Search Engine

This week we will discuss the key to improving your sites listing in the top Internet search engines.
When a user enters a search term, also known as a ‘keyword,’ into a search engine, the engine runs through the billions of pages in the database and awards each one a ‘relevancy score.’ The higher your score, the higher your listing. If your site doesn’t contain the keyword used by the searcher, the only score it’s going to get is a big, fat zero. Your first task then is to make sure you know which keywords are most relevant for each of your sites.

There are three ways to figure out your keywords:
***********************************************************
Ask your competitors
***********************************************************
This is the cheapest way to find many of the most important keywords. Simply log on to a search engine (AltaVista is good, Google is better) and carry out a search for sites like yours. Open the top site, and once the home

page has downloaded, click on ‘View’ in your browser, and then
‘Source.’ That will reveal all the HTML used to build the Web page, including all the keywords that have been specially inserted.

For example, let’s say one of your websites sold nutritional supplements. You could carry out a search for ‘vitamins’ in Google. The top site there is called DrugEmporium.com, and the keywords they list are "The Katz group, Snyders, Drug Emporium, Drug, Drug Store, pharmacy, stores."

Some of those keywords will be relevant to your site. Others, of course, won’t be relevant and there will be lots of other keywords that aren’t obviously listed—like ‘vitamins’ for example. But you can repeat the process on other sites, using different keywords, and build up a pretty long list.

************************************************************
Ask the pay-per-clicks
************************************************************

Pay-per-click sites actually let you see how popular a keyword is. They’re not being kind; they’re trying to make money. The more webmasters bid on those keywords, the higher the bids are going to rise—and the more money the pay-per-clicks are going to make. FindWhat, for example, has
a Keyword Center, and Overture a Keyword Suggestion Tool. Both are very handy, but they also require you to open an account. That can cost a few bucks, but when you have a lot of sites covering a lot of different areas, it’s usually worth the expense.

************************************************************
Use a specialized tool
************************************************************

Not too surprisingly, a number of companies have popped up to supply specific keyword services for a fee. The best of these is WordTracker.com. They’re not bargain basement, but you get what you pay for. They’ll give you all the keywords you need and in my experience, they’re a sound investment.

Googlefight.com is another useful tool to see whether one keyword is more popular than another. The site compares two keywords and tells you which is more popular. It’s free and has a limited use, but it’s fun to play with.

As you make up your list of keywords, bear in mind that it’s also worth looking at key phrases. It’s quite possible that a user looking to buy flowers online might search for ‘red roses’ or ‘cheap bouquets’ as well as just ‘flowers.’ Key phrases are often overlooked by competitors, so you’ve got a
pretty good chance of getting a high placement with the right combination.

Don’t worry too much about the competition though. Some people will tell you that you’re better off trying to find keywords that no one else has thought of—as if there were any!—and others will tell you to throw in keywords that are only slightly relevant to your businesses.

In my experience, that’s a waste of time. If your competitors are using certain keywords, it’s because they know they work. And if you pick up any users using irrelevant keywords, you’re not going to sell them anything. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel here: just try to figure out the most popular keywords and the best key phrases to put on your site.

Whichever of these methods you use—and I tend to use more than one—you should end up with a pretty comprehensive list of keywords that you can stick into your website. The next question then, is how do you use them? When a search engine assigns relevancy to a site, it looks for the keywords in a
number of specific areas.

************************************************************
Title Tag
************************************************************

The title tag is written in the head section of the Web
page and after the title tags. It’s usually the line listed in the search results as well. For example, the New York Times’ title tag is “The New York Times on the Web: Daily international, national and local news coverage from the newspaper, breaking news updates, technology news,sports, reviews, crosswords, classified ad listings.”

That looks long, but the title tag is usually between 50 and 80 characters including spaces. Different search engines have different limits so you want to make sure that your most important words are near the beginning of the title. When you look at the New York Times’ site, you only see “The
New York Times on the Web”.

The rest of the title is made up of keywords and phrases but in fact, you don’t want to put in too many keywords here. just place one keyword as the second or third word in the title. Too many, and your site could be seen as spamming.

You can also list more keywords in the meta and meta sections of the head area, but because these areas have been so abused in the past, a number of search engines today will skip right past the title tag and go straight to the Web copy.

************************************************************
Web Copy for SEO
************************************************************

The search engines will scan the text on a Web page to see if your site is relevant to the search term. That means that in effect, your Web copy is going to have to do two things: to persuade a customer to buy, and persuade a search engine it’s relevant.

When you write your copy aim for about 500 words a page, but throw in between four and eight keywords. You’ll have to try to balance a smooth text flow with getting in all the keywords you need to be listed. You can also consider adding text-only pages such as how-to articles, tips or tutorials to your site. Throw in some keywords and they can turn up in search engines and create
opportunities for link exchanges.

So there’s a few ways you can try to improve the position of your site in a search engine. More important than where you put the keywords is choosing the right keywords. That’s not
really a huge challenge as your competitors are likely to have done the job for you.

Of course, even if you do get everything right, it doesn’t mean you’re going to shoot straight to the top of Google. One of the criteria for relevancy is how long you’ve been online, so success on the search engines won’t come overnight. The sooner you start submitting though, the
sooner you can start to rise.

Managing Your List: Paid List Servers vs. Free List Servers

This week we will be discussing how to manage your email
lists. It can be a big job but we’ll discuss how you can
get a handle on it with minimal fuss.

As you build up your subscriber list, you’re going to find
yourself with a problem. Whichever mail program you’re
using, whether it’s Outlook or Eudora or something else,
it’s just not going to be set up to deal with the kind of
mass mailing involved with newsletters.

If you have more than 50 people on your list—

and that will
probably take you less than a week—you’ll need to use a
listserv. Don’t even try to do this by yourself!

My hosting company organize this for me. They have a mail
server that handles all the mail. I just send them the
newsletter and they send it out. Alternatively, you can use
a professional listserv such as Microsoft’s List Builder or
Sparklist.

There are free list servers available too. While you can use
these if you’re on a really tight budget, I don’t recommend
it. First, they stuff their own adverts onto your
newsletter. That doesn’t just reduce the effectiveness of
your brand, it draws attention away from your own
ads—provided you can persuade people to advertise on a
newsletter like this. But their privacy policies have also
come under a lot of criticism lately and even some of the
biggest companies have been found to have used their
clients’ lists to market their own goods.

If you’re going to do a newsletter—and you should—it’s worth
investing in a professional service. That is, after all,
what you’re offering.

In conclusion, newsletters then are one of the most
effective ways to keep customers, and keep your revenue
flowing in. They remind people you’re still out there,
provide news about deals and bargains, and give customers
the confidence to buy. You can put them together in a snap,
or even pay someone a pretty small fee to do it for you. If
you sell advertising space on your newsletter, you’ll even
find each issue will pay for itself.