Promotion and search engine news
High quality
information about website promotion, meta tags and search engine optimisation.
June 6th, 2001
| Having a hard time in getting your site listed at Yahoo? The Position Papers newsletter
lists a few common problems that are often overlooked but can easily prevent a site from
being accepted. It also has a couple questions and answers about commercial Yahoo submissions and the
recent redesign of AOL's search feature, plus some clues on what vortals are and how to optimize
your site for them.
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| Kevin Elliott has posted an interview with Susan O'Neil, a
search engine optimization professional, on
his site. Susan has been in the business for four years now and in this interview she
shares some of her thoughts about SEO. She also reveals some of the most common problems
that prevent sites from getting a satisfactory ranking in the search engines and gives
her opinion on how much a medium-sized company should expect to invest on a SEO campaign.
In addition to the interview, Kevin has also reviewed a book called "Maximize Web Site Traffic", written by Robin Nobles
and Susan O'Neil. He seems to be impressed with the contents, but notes that the deadly enemy of SEO information, time, has
already made parts of the book obsolete even while it is under a year old. I guess it's true what they say, time moves faster
on the Internet.
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June 5th, 2001
| Want to know what's new in the search engine industry? If that is the case, then you should take a look at
the recently released June issue of Search Engine Watch's "Search Engine Report"
newsletter. Some of the recent events that have attracted Danny's attention are Iwon's and Canada.com's decisions to use paid
results exclusively in their search features, the changes that are taking place at MSN, Altavista & AOL and the closing of the
Magellan search engine.
The newsletter also has a review of meta search engines, which have become increasingly popular. Are they a valuable resource to
searchers or are they so filled with paid results that there's no sense in using them?
If you use the search engines frequently to find information or just want to get a good picture about what is going on in the search
engines you are promoting your site in, the "Search Engine Report" is recommended reading. But if you're only interested in how to
improve your ranking, it probably isn't your cup of tea.
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June 4th, 2001
| Several search engines and directories, for example Yahoo, Inktomi and
Looksmart offer the possibility to pay for getting promptly listed (or
at least being considered for a listing) in their indices. But what benefits do such
services have, how much do they cost and are they worth the price? In today's
Search Engine Tips, Robin Nobles looks at this question and gives her opinion
about the usefulness of these programs. I believe that her judgments are sound in all cases except
Inktomi's - considering the rate they have been losing partners at, I wouldn't pay a
dime to get my pages indexed by them.
By the way, the SE Tips newsletter also has an article called "Use 404 pages to your advantage" written
by yours truly. It contains a brief set of instructions that you can use to minimize the visitor loss
caused by dead links, so if your site doesn't have a custom error page yet, reading the article might be a good
idea.
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June 3rd, 2001
| Writing articles and then submitting them to ezines can be a nice
way of creating short bursts of traffic to your site and help you establish yourself as an
expert on the topic you are writing about. However, there is one problem most of us have to face, and
that is the fact that we aren't professional writers. Putting together even a brief article seems to take an eternity,
because we don't really know how to express the ideas we have.
While I'm not suggesting that reading one article can turn you from an amateur to a pro, PromoteNewz has
a good set of instructions you can use to help you get started. It also has some links to
places where you can submit your articles for consideration and hopefully get them published, creating
fame and bringing visitors to your pages.
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| Yahoo provides a good amount of traffic for those who are able
to get listed in the directory. However, many have spent a lot of time and money
in submitting and resubmitting to the directory without being accepted. This has caused
great frustration and anger among some webmasters, a few even going as far as claiming that the
editor of the category they were submitting to was obviously biased against their site
and that it is the true reason for their site's rejection.
If you are one of those people, issue #332 of the I-Search discussion list offers some comfort for those who are worried that
a demonic category editor might be keeping their site from being listed. It also reveals whether the order of your
meta and title tags has any effect on your ranking at search engines or not.
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June 2nd, 2001
| The pay-per-click model keeps spreading as more and more search engines have started using
GoTo's results alongside their own. While this might cause some difficulties to sites that earn the bulk of their
income by selling advertising space, it will create plenty of attractive opportunities to those who are selling
products over the Internet.
Not depending on which group you belong to, now is a very good time to get to know
this advertising model better unless you have already done so. At PromotionBase, Kurt Thumlert offers some basic information about
the subject, complete with a nice set of hints on how to play the PPC search engine game.
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June 1st, 2001
We haven't looked at the Lycos 50 for a few weeks, so an update is definitely
due. There has been plenty of movement in the top ten as Buffy's season finale and Pearl Harbor's opening
pushed them into positions nine and five, respectively.
The Lycos 50(TM) Top 10 Search Terms for the Week Ending May 26, 2001
| 1) Dragonball |
6) Final Fantasy |
| 2) Britney Spears |
7) Pokemon |
| 3) Tattoos |
8) WWF |
| 4) Napster |
9) Buffy the Vampire Slayer |
| 5) Pearl Harbor |
10) Pamela Anderson |
If you want to get some more details about recent events in the Lycos 50, I suggest that
you check out the press release sent out by Lycos. Those who aren't satisfied with seeing just
the top ten search terms can also take a look at the complete list in here. However, don't let the
list fool you into thinking it's something it really isn't, check out the FAQ in order to understand
what you are seeing before you do anything else.
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| MSN has been a popular search engine for quite some time now, having grown
bigger than many of its competitors during the past two years. According to a recent StatMarket press release
MSN has now become the second most popular referring search service after Yahoo for US surfers.
While this statistic is certainly a very interesting one, it is impossible to say whether it is
accurate or not. There are plenty of companies out there that provide this kind of information and all of them
seem to have different opinions on the market shares of individual engines. Perhaps StatMarket is right and
MSN has taken the second place, or perhaps they are wrong and Google is the most popular engine after Yahoo.
In any case, there's one thing we can count on - MSN is a very widely used search engine and seems to continue
increasing its market share.
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I happened to spot a very wild rumor involving Google and Inktomi. These
search engines have previously been bitterly competing against each other, with Google having
the upper hand ever since it snatched the position of providing Yahoo's secondary results from Ink last year. Now
Dotcom Scoop has posted some truly amazing information, suggesting that Inktomi is attempting
to buy Google. However, I wouldn't recommend taking this one too seriously, as even the source
of this juicy piece is somewhat skeptical:
A close examination of Inktomi's financials reveal that the company would be hard pressed to put a deal together to acquire Google.
And there has been absolutely zero indication that Google is on the market and less indication that the company can't ride out this storm.
Cindy McCaffrey, Google's VP of Corporate Communications also said that nothing is going on with Inktomi, when ResearchBuzz's Tara Calishain asked
whether the rumor was true or not. Given the information available, I'd say that this story is 99% likely to be a duck. Still, stranger things have
happened, albeit this would probably be in the top ten if a deal would be reached.
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