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| Relevant Links: |
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Webmasterworld
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| - the place for dicussing internet marketing, with specific topics by search engine. If it happens, it'll be reported here first! |
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Pay Per Click Search Engines |
| - with over 553 PPC engines listed, this is the best way to stay abreast of the latest cost per click news. Not that there are 553 engines worth paying for however...
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Overture Keyword Tool |
| - Find out how many searches were performed for your products last month on Overture's network. |
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Search Engine Tools |
| - some excellent tools for search engine optimisation, including a search engine spider "simulator". |
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Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation is a process in which a website can be altered to enable search engine software ("spiders") to access that site better, remember the information on that site better and to get that site higher in the rankings.
Some pearls of (ahem) wisdom...
1) Which engines should I target? - the stats below, taken from one of our clients, rank the top 10 most search engines & directories for the week ending 21 June, 2003.
| Ranking | Search Engine Name | Share of Visitors |
| 1. | Google.com | 24.23%
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| 2. | Google.co.uk | 17.97% |
| 3. | Yahoo.com | 8.01% |
| 4. | MSN.com | 6.45% |
| 5. | AskJeeves.co.uk | 5.42% |
| 6. | Yahoo.com | 4.97% |
| 7. | MSN.co.uk | 4.34% |
| 8. | AOL.co.uk | 3.35% |
| 9. | Freeserve.com | 2.49% |
| 10. | Aol.com | 1.97% |
This is just a sample, but the proportions are typical. Notice how large a proportion of the visitors comes from the main portals - Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Freeserve.
This shows you how important it is to target the main sources of traffic. Don't go after the "300,000 submissions in 24 hours" offers - they rarely get you where you need to be.
2) Search feeds - apart from Google, the majority of the engines and directories are fed search results by a mixture of partners....
| Search Engine | Search Partners |
| Yahoo.com | Overture Sitematch, Overture CPC and it's own human edited directory |
| Yahoo.co.uk | Google, Overture and it's own human edited directory |
| MSN | Overture & Inktomi |
| AskJeeves | Google, Teoma, Ask Jeeves, Espotting, Overture and Mirago |
| AOL | Google & Overture |
| Freeserve | Google & Overture |
Use the sites on the left to keep on top of these carefully. They change constantly - and to keep your site at the top of the engines, you need to keep on top of the partners.
3) Flash and Frames - sites with these tend to perform badly in search engines. This is because search engine spiders can't read the code in flash file and don't read all the information from internal files in frames sites. Avoid these technologies whenever possible - or at least present alternatives that the spiders can crawl.
4) Title Tags - remember to include title meta tags in your site. If you don't include these the site will perform less effectively than if they are included. Most search engines place great emphasis on the title meta tags.
5) Don't spam the search engines - multiple submissions are now frowned upon by most major search engines as a drain on their resources. A good search engine will keep your site in their listings once it is in, unless the site is down for some considerable length of time (weeks rather than days).
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