Connecticut Internet Marketing

Connecticut: Internet Marketing Tips :
Internet marketing continues to be highly competitive, with search engines constantly restructuring and buying other search engines. While cross-licensing of databases abounds, each SE has its own methods for creating its lists, accepting submissions, finding pages, ranking pages, and selling ads and preferred listings. Particularly in the way they rank pages, each SE is highly secretive about their methods, and making constant changes in the never-ending struggle to be #1. Internet marketing professionals generally rely on servers and software that "probe" the search engines regularly to determine what is causing one page to rank above another (as well as methods they openly advertise such as Overture's pay-per-click Search Suggestion Tool) and then use all of the information to optimize webpages and submit them to maintain and increase rankings for particular keywords.

What's the most important search engine?
That depends. Suffice it to say that the three major players continue to be Yahoo, Google, and MSN. (For retail sales, AOL is also an important SE)
While Google has more brand name recognition, and is the most popular single search engine of the three, Yahoo licenses its databases to more search engines and so actually accounts for more of the actual searches. MSN has been coveting the market for some time, and with some recent acquisitions and restructuring (as well as obvious resources), promises to become a significant threat to Google and Yahoo in the near future. (The recent talk among SE pros is that in Google's attempt to revolutionize the SE market by creating a method for reading Flash websites, they had very limited success and lost valuable ground.) Nonetheless, there are some 10 to 15 SEs (including meta search engines... which search multiple SEs simultaneously) that are important to be listed on.

How Do I Get My Website Listed #1?
The short answer is that nothing will guarantee it and that whatever works today won't necessarily work tomorrow.
The long answer is to optimize your pages using the most recent information about how SEs rank pages, change them from time to time so they are not considered stale by the SEs, and submit them fairly regularly.
Consider it from the SEs' point of view. They profit from helping people find what they're looking for; fast, accurate, and current information. In their goal to accomplish this, they're not only caching more sites and striving to have as many recently updated sites in their listings, but removing websites from their listings with outdated information, or that use obvious attempts at deception to gain higher rankings. (Examples include the old method of keywords of the same color text as a background, pages that list meaningless links of websites (link farms), etc.) Generally speaking, the implications are that if you have useful webpages designed and optimized honestly for important keywords with a robust amount of relevant copy, update them frequently, and they are submitted fairly regularly, the SEs will rank them highly.

What About Ads or "Sponsored Links" on the Search Engines Themselves?
The most important question to ask yourself is, "Do Your customers Look at Them"? In many cases, people often subconsciously dismiss that section of the results. Ask someone what comes up as the first listing for a search and they often tell you the first listing, skipping the ad before it. In some cases, however, you might just be looking to buy something, and an ad is exactly what you want. The real question to ask at this point is, "From 1 cent to $5 a click, is this the best place to spend your resources? Oftentimes, for less of an investment, you can optimize existing pages, or create new ones, and submit them to multiple SEs rather than advertise on only one. After all, a well-designed, relevant webpage will bring more business with 10 visitors a day than a poorly-designed page with 100 views a day. Once at least some basic level of optimization is done for your most important pages, pay-per-click methods can create the extra quality traffic you're looking for. Like all forms of advertising, what works for one industry, may not for another, so it's a good idea to try a variety of things, track what works for you, and then invest accordingly.

What Else Matters in Getting a High Ranking?
Of course relevance, how current a page is, and of course the presence of a particular keyword are all essential. Other factors in SEO include:
• metatags (the behind-the-scenes list of keywords in the page code, though these are increasingly being de-emphasized as they are often used incorrectly or dishonestly.)
• keyword frequency (how many times that keyword is in the text. Note: too often can be as harmful as too little)
• keyword prominence (where it appears; i.e. towards the top and/or bottom of the page)
• occurrence of the keyword in other places (links, image names, PDF names, etc.)

The list goes on, but an important point is whether an existing page should be optimized or if a new one should be created specifically to rank highly for a keyword. In the latter case, changing the appearance of a page is not an issue so more techniques can be used, producing better results. (Note: with multiple copies of the same "Doorway pages" that use variants of the same keyword, the recent consensus is to vary the copy somewhat so the SEs do not flag them as obvious attempts at duplication)

Link Popularity:
Google is the most obvious example of the importance of link popularity. Geberally speaking, the more relevant websites that are already in their database that link to your website, the higher your website gets ranked. But, 1 link from a web site that recieves a lot of traffic (e.g. About.com) can be worth tens of low-traffic web sites linking to your site. Each SEs emphasizes link popularity to various degrees and the SE community continues to debate its usefulness (and fairness). The bottom line is that so long as any of the major SEs value link popularity, the better it is to have 10 other websites (that they list) linking to yours than to only have 1. (You can check your link popularity at Google by typing in "link:www.domain.com". Check your competition as well to see if it's an important factor in your case)

Other Considerations:
In addition to having optimized webpages for important keywords, and submitting the pages regularly, it's important to know who IS coming to your website. First of all, use a hosting company that provides at least some form of web statistics tracking and check them regularly so you know what your visitors are interested in (and what they're not). Also, spend a few minutes using various SEs to see how you're listed (or get a report with the details on all of your keywords) so you know what could be better.

Conclusion:
Like any other form of advertising, SEO/SEP is an art, not a science. It is true that most SEs "spider" or "crawl" the Internet looking for websites to list, but unless your pages are attractive to them (not just human visitors), they'll never rank as highly as they could. In short, plan, optimize and submit! With the ranking methods changing all of the time, unless you have the time to learn and keep updated on what works, use a professional. Your competition probably does.

With search engines sometimes ranking irrelevant pages ahead of the important ones, and not responding for several months to e-mail (if at all), it can be quite frustrating. On the other hand, it's a wonderful feeling to see your website is ranked highly for an important keyword when a search for that word produces tens or hundreds of thousands of results! For many businesses, gaining only one significant customer is well worth the effort and investment.