Basic Search Engine Promotion
By Jim Edwards
©2004 All rights reserved
I can't tell you how many times people have asked me, "How to do I get my site to come up in the top ten of the search
engines so I can get hits and sell my product?"
What they really want to know is, "How can I get people to show up to my website without spending any money on
advertising my site!"
People usually don't like my answer because accomplishing a "top ten ranking" on any search engine always requires
careful thought along with a significant amount of work.
Three types of "Search engines" abound on the Internet. They include true search engines, directories and links pages.
At last count approximately 10,000 sites referred to themselves as search engines, though only about a dozen
sites rate your attention since they drive 97% of the Internet's search traffic. These sites include Google, Yahoo!,
Overture, MSN, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, Lycos, Dmoz and a few others.
When a visitor logs onto a search engine looking for information, they enter "keywords" about the subject in
hopes of obtaining a list of relevant websites.
Each search engine or directory operates with its own rules about judging a site's relevancy to a keyword search.
They look at text on the web page (body text) as well as words you can't see which reside in the actual code of the
web pages. This code includes such things as alt tags, title tags and others.
Depending on the search engine, what you can't see may represent a far more important part of ranking well than
the words appearing on the page.
Search engines look at how many times a keyword shows up in the various parts of your website as well as actual
location on the page.
Assuming that an important subject for your pages would appear at the beginning of a page, those web pages starting
with the keyword should rank better than those that don't. Also, in many cases, the more websites linking to your site
will drastically impact your rankings.
Entire books and websites exist to teach eager website owners how to pump up their rankings on all the various
search engines, however these promotion tips will serve you well in your quest for the "Top Ten!"
See what others have done for maximum exposure!
Go to the various search engines and perform a search under which you would like to appear. Dissect those pages to find
the common elements that make them show up.
- How often and where do the keywords appear on the page?
- How many words on the page in total?
- Do they put keywords in their hypertext links?
- How many other sites link to them and could you easily get
a link from those sites too?
Beware of registration vs. promotion
Plenty of companies will "register" your website with thousands of search engines for about $50-$100.
But simply submitting to the search engines won't do much for you. Without the proper structure in your website, only
sheer luck will cause your site to pop up in the top ten!
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