Search Engine Optimization: To Want or To be Wanted!!

Company's presence within search engines is the most important factor in maintaining high brand awareness - more so than print, radio, or TV advertising."
- Sales & Marketing Management Magazine, January 2001

To Want or To Be Wanted!!

Search Engines

A "search engine" simply means that a computer or "robot" will analyze your site to determine its relevancy and ultimate ranking.

Search engine is a tool that enables users to locate information on the World Wide Web. It is a program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents or Web pages where the keywords were found.

Search engines use keywords entered by users to find Web sites, which contain the information sought. It also applies to Web sites that catalogue other Web sites by topic.

In technical terms, Search Engine is a server or a collection of servers dedicated to indexing Internet web pages, storing the results and returning lists of pages that match particular queries. The indexes are normally generated using spiders.

Available Search Engines

The major search engines are Google, Altavista, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos, Northern Light and Webcrawler. There are over 150 search engines and directories.

However the term Search Engine is also often used to describe both directories and search engines. For example Yahoo is a directory, not a search engine.

In one research, Web Side Story found Google as top referral with 40.9 percent %, Yahoo at 27.4 percent and MSN at 19.6 percent.

Here are the results of usage of most favorite search engines.

China - Google 73%, Yahoo 13%
Germany - Google 81%, Yahoo 6%
UK - Google 66%, Yahoo 11%
Australia - Google 38%, Yahoo 25%, MSN 9%
New Zealand - Google 35%, Yahoo 20%, MSN 9%

Source: WebSideStory and Hitwise

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the process of choosing targeted keyword phrases related to a site, and ensuring that the site places well when those keyword phrases are part of a Web search. (Marketing Online)

What you need to do is to optimize web pages and/or web site to perform well in the search engines.

Why SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is critical to all on line business success. A website is only the beginning for the on line business - no matter how flashy and innovative your website might be, if no one can find it they will not generate the return on investment you are looking for.

A good Search Engine Optimization strategy will not only get your website positioned well with the search engines but will contain compelling content and strong marketing strategies to get casual searchers to click thru to your site.

How?

There is no short cut to reach there. The whole process starts with optimization of META tags, ALT tags, Content, Design etc and continues through out to, keep abreast with the changing Search Engine algorithm.

There is a growing niche of consultants and firms who specialize in this.

What kind of consultancy services do SEO optimizers provide?

Submitting Your Sites
Site Submissions to Different Search Engines and Directory
Country Specific Search Engine Submission
Auto Submission Special Interest Search Engines

Optimization Analysis
Keyword, link popularity and code related services like;
Keyword Effectiveness Analysis (KEI), Keyword Popularity Analysis, Keyword Competition Analysis, Keyword Bid Analysis, Website Code / Graphics Analysis, Link Popularity Analysis, Link Competition Analysis and Setup & Maintain Reciprocal Link Exchange

SEO Optimization

After doing analysis, SEO helps you in defining site component e.g. Number Of Keywords, Unique Title, Description And Keyword Optimization / Page, Website Code / Graphics Optimization and Web Site Text Optimization

Business with Search Engines

Search engine can help you to get your site listed on top as paid service. If you want to get listed your site directly, its no worry way; just pay and get it on top or get it highlighted with associated product search.

Generally Search engine provides following paid services.

Pay and get your site listed
Yahoo.com and MSN.com list commercial websites on payment of US$200 to US$400 per year.

Register Site
If you choose to pay for your registration, your website will be listed on the search engines after 2–5 working days. If you choose not to pay, you may wait for up to two years before being listed.

Pay–per–Click
You pay per click. And the more you are willing to pay, the higher priority you receive.

Sponsored/featured links
To achieve a position above or at the side of the results list you have the option of paying to be there.

From paid service, you can get benefits of high visibility, shorter time to listing, space for a listing and multiple links listing.

What you can do?

You can always look for improving your web pages and content.

Prepare keywords : Maintain keywords for every page to attract web crawler. These can be business related or product descriptive keywords.

No. of Hyperlinks : Manage structured navigation. No. of hyperlinks can first of all made navigation easy and further it attracts web crawler.

Text: Size of text, amount of text, quality of text and font of text do matter.

References : How many other sites do refer to your page? That's why add your URL in emails, newsletters or online publication.

List your sites with other partners and associations.

Meta tags: Generally keywords are entered in Meta tags. Meta tags describe your web page.

Finally

The best search is the one that takes the least time to get wanted results.

Because;

We are seeking, each in our own way, a sense of happiness!!.