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The Truth About Web Site Promotion!
Note: This article is intended as an additional, more-detailed in-depth look at Search Engines and how they work, and is complimentary to my previous article, "How To Set Up & Market Your Online Business".
So you now have a business web site to sell your product or service.... how can you let people know you are on the internet and start bringing traffic to your site?
Many people think that just putting up a web site is enough, that customers will automatically find their way to their site, and while there, purchase their products. Nothing could be further from the truth. Publicizing your web site is HARD WORK, but in this article I will attempt to take some of the mystery out of the process for you.
Search Engine Confusion
Have you ever received email advertisements with titles like, "Submit Your Site to 13,500 Search Engines a Month! - Guaranteed Listing in the top 30 Positions!"? I'm sure we have all seen these fantastic claims from time to time on web sites and in sales letters trying to "Hype" their search engine submission services. Let's take a minute to examine these claims.
First of all, have you ever SEEN 13,500 Search Engines? Do you have any idea who or where they are? No? Well, probably the reason you haven't seen or heard of them is that there aren't that many true search engines in existence on the internet! So how can submission companies make these wild claims?
If they were totally honest they would tell you there are only approximately 16 well-known main search engines. These are: Yahoo, Alta Vista, Infoseek/Go, NBCi (formerly Snap), Excite/WebCrawler, MSN Search, Netscape, Google, AOL Search, HotBot, Lycos, Dogpile, Northern Lights, What-U-Seek (powered by Chubba), Infospace & Earthlink. Some of these are not true Search Engines, but are "spider-type" directories. Any internet marketing professional will tell you that if you want your business to do well on the internet, you MUST be listed with all or most of these top 16 search engines.
A man who stands out from these professionals is Cory Rudl, a self-made millionaire, who gets over 4 million visitors to his websites yearly, does 5.2 million dollars in sales online each year (yes, that is $5,200,000), and personally makes hundreds of thousands of dollars from his online businesses... all from his one small office. He is the author of the most successful marketing course on the internet, "The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet" and I highly recommend this course for serious internet entrepreneurs. Allow me to quote from his course:
"Only the Top Eight Search Engines Matter!"
Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, InfoSeek, Lycos, Northern Light, WebCrawler and Yahoo are the engines Cory lists as the engines that really "matter"....
He states, "Excite gets over 10 million searches a month, Infoseek gets over 9 million searches per month. Alta Vista gets over 8 million searches a month, Lycos gets over 5 million, Web Crawler gets over 2.4 million and HotBot gets over 1.4 million. I've seen estimates indicating that over 80% of all traffic generated by Search Engines come from the top 8-10 search engines."
So who are the 13,500 so-called search engines mentioned above? They are probably the many thousands of FFA (Free For All) sites and other various Directories found all over the world on the internet.
There are thousands of "Free For All" link sites on the web today. These are sites that will link to your site for FREE and your site can be submitted to these with various kinds of Submitting Software. But these are NOT search engines, no matter how some promotional companies might say they are!
What About FFA Sites & Directories?
Have you ever submitted your site URL to the nework of FFA sites and then within minutes your email box fills up with sales letters? What causes this is that the people who have set up FFA sites have them for the primary reason of collecting email addresses so they can send you a sales letter via their autoresponder email account. These sites seldom generate any real traffic because the people who own them only want a way to advertise back to you.
However, I don't count FFA site submission as a total loss, in fact they do have their purpose in internet marketing. Many of the "main" search engines will actually place your site higher in their listings if you have MANY links to your site on the internet.
Submitting your URL to FFA sites does provide a way to get many, many links to your site. However, these links don't last long because they scroll down the page as new links are submitted, consequently, you will need to submit your site often to these in order to keep links to your site active.
There are also other places on the internet that are "called" search engines, but in actuality are "Directories" or a network of bulletin boards and "Classified Ads" sites. So if you are serious about marketing your web site, don't ignore the submission of your URL regularly to these as well.
The Most "Important" Search Engines
Let's go back to discussing the most important search engines, the ones where 80% of your potential customers will be looking for your site. It is imperative that you be listed in some, if not all of these important engines for potential customers to be able to find you, and it's not as easy to get listed as it used to be. For one thing, each search engine has its own "submission rules" and they are all different..... looking for different things on each web site to allow them to be listed in high positions.
Many of the leading engines are now promoting programs where they ask you to pay fees of $99 or $199 to submit your business site. In fact, Yahoo will no longer accept free submissions of business sites at all! And... Yahoo will NOT allow you to submit your business site to any other category except Business or Shopping, which are totally PAY to list categories.
Three other main engines, MSN, Excite and Dogpile have entered into partnership with a service called "Looksmart" and now offer paid submissions for business sites to be listed promptly in their main directories. In these three engines, non-profit sites can still list for free, and business sites can be submitted at no cost, only to their web site Index, not to the main directories of their sites.
I would be remiss if I didn't tell you about another kind of Search Engine service that has surfaced lately called "pay per click". One of these is GoTo.com where you can research and bid on your top keywords. Then you "pay per click" to get traffic to your site. In all the business boards I have visited lately, the general consensus is that "pay per click" is the wave of the future for businesses who don't want to pay HUGE dollars to get listed with top search engines.
Submit By Hand!
With the main search engines' new rules and the magnitude of competition out there, I have to tell you that it's very important you submit your URL to these engines "by hand", and keep resubmitting your URL at least once a month. "By hand" means that you will physically go to the Search Engine site, find the appropriate category to list your site, and then physically submit it with a list of optimized keywords and description. Even then, it often will take several weeks or months for your site to be listed, so you'll have to keep doing this as a regular monthly task.
"What?", you say, "I don't have that kind of time..... I'm busy running my business!" Then I say to you, in this case it's better to hire a professional to do your listings for you "by hand". And you'll want to hire someone you can trust to do this.... you can't just trust every submission service to actually go to each search engine and submit your URL by hand. Be sure to ask any potential submission company if they list by hand. This could make the difference in whether or not your site is submitted properly according to search engine rules.
I wish you good fortune with your online business!
Yours Truly,
Lonna
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