Newsletter Archive

This part discusses submitting your web site to the search engines. Submitting your web site to the search engines will not, by itself, gain you alot of traffic. Submitting your site does not even ensure that it will be listed in that search engine. Like the white pages of your phone book, you MUST be listed. People that know of your company, but not your web site address, will go to a search engine to find you. Even those that know your exact URL may type it into a search engine to "pull it up". Your site needs to be listed in the search engines people use, even if it's only found by your existing customers.

Getting listed in the search engines is not as simple as it appears to be. There have been books and entire newsgroups devoted to teaching people how to get the most from their listing in the search engines. Some companies have even built their entire business plan around selling positioning in other people's search engines. Before you submit your site to the search engines, there are several areas one needs to understand. The first is a clear understanding of how people use the search engines. To help with this, I asked Patrick Weatherford of Reference Desk for some tips on finding what you need from a search engine.

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Searching for Information By Patrick Weatherford http://www.ReferenceDesk.org

Searching the web can be a daunting task. Performing a simple search, for instance about "jobs", can turn out to be a major headache. Searching for this term on the popular search engine "Google" will turn up over 13 million pages. Finding the exact information you are looking for could become an all day job!

Some basic tips can help you cut down your searching time. First of all, have the search engine return the maximum number of hits possible per page. This will give you a better selection of sites to pick from, without having to click to the next page.

Secondly, be as specific as possible in your search. Adding the terms "retail grocery management" narrows down our search to only 9,640 results. Add the word "California" and your search narrows down to a more manageable 2,660 results. From there, it becomes much easier to find what you are looking for. Most major search engines will rank their listing by relevance, or by popularity. This way, you generally get the information you are looking for with little effort. Usually the first few results are the best, followed by others that may not be related to what you are looking for.

Look at this example:

Jobs - 13 million pages Jobs retail - 496,000 pages Jobs retail grocery - 23,400 pages Jobs retail grocery management - 9,640 pages Jobs retail grocery management California - 2,660 pages Jobs retail grocery management southern California - 1,060 pages Jobs retail grocery management southern California 401(k) plan - 55 pages

Third, be sure to read the help page for each search engine if necessary. The people who designed the search engine are the ones who wrote the help files, so they know better than anyone else how to get good results.

Another good way to search is by using a web directory, instead of a true search engine. Yahoo.com and Dmoz.org are the two biggest directories. The web sites you find listed there are manually added by human editors, so you will rarely find off-topic sites. The downside of these directories, however, is that the number of sites to choose from is much much smaller.

Hopefully these hints will help you in your internet searches.

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After reading this article, a couple of things should jump out at you. When people are searching, they type in words (key words) to find what they are looking for. Every search engine ranks their returns by relevance to help their users. Every search engine uses different rules to create this relevance. The first thing most search engines check to create this relevance is key words. These key words can be in the text of the site, Meta headers and/or the site title.

The question that must be answered is: "What would someone search for if he/she is trying to find my products or services?". Make a list of these words. Review the list with one of your customers and see what words they would add.

Next week I will cover different ways you can add those words to your site to help gain traffic from the search engines.

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