| Internet Marketing - Search Engines and Directories | ||
First of all, what exactly is a
search engine? directory? How do they obtain their
information? For our purposes, a search engine is:
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This means that the consumer is not required to pay a fee to receive the results of their search. This differs from a legitimate Internet Marketing method where companies pay a fee to be prominently listed within the relevant search results. Take your public library as an example. I cannot envision having to pay a fee to enter the public library and check out a book; I understand also that some book companies are willing to pay a fee to be prominently listed within their topic. This is okay as long as their information is relevant to the topic. |
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| Search engines receive their information from programs called robots, spiders or crawlers. These programs traverse the World Wide Web 24 / 7 searching for new and updated web sites. Each search engine has their own algorithm - the specifics of which are a closely guarded secret - that determines what they include from each web site. It is safe to say that if your web site is active and not on a FREE server, it has been visited by at least one of the almost 300 robots. A more detailed discussion of this topic will be presented in later tips. | ||
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| Directory: During the infancy of the Internet, directories were categorized search engines implemented by people. Your web site was visited by a human; the decision to include your site or not was made by a human; the only results you received were from the directory. Now most directories include results from a search engine and most search engines contain directory listings. A detailed discussion of directories will be covered in later tips. | ||
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| As a consumer, we use search engines to quickly find relevant information about a topic of interest to us. We type short phrases (keywords), usually three or four words, and then click on the search button. The results of this search will, hopefully, provide us a relevant answer to our quest for information. As an example, suppose you search for small business resources on Google. You will receive a listing of about 83,500,000 web pages that contain information about your search topic. At 10 results per page (Google default), that is 8,350,000 pages of information! How many pages would you look through before you were frustrated and either tried another, more specific search, or just quit altogether? No matter how many results are returned, the vast majority of consumers will only inspect the results on the first two or three pages. | ||
| Highlighted below are the major search engines and directories as of year end 2007: | ||
| Google - Yahoo! - MSN/Windows Live - AOL - Ask | ||
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| The results for 95%+ of ALL searches on the Internet from ANY search engine or directory will be derived from the information contained within at least one of the above search engines. | ||
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| SUMMARY: Your goal, as a web site owner, is to be listed as near to the top of the first three pages of at least one of the above major search engines as possible. Submitting your web site to a myriad of search engines or directories without first optimizing for at least one of the major search engines or directories is an exercise in futility. Any increased visitation will be accidental and short-lived. | ||
| Next I will introduce the most popular Internet Marketing methods available to the majority of small business owners and entrepreneurs today. | ||
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