To successfully rank highly in the search engines, the words on your Web pages should never be an afterthought but a major investment in your search engine optimization campaign.

After your keyword research to find out how potential customers will search for your products and services, writing search-engine-friendly copy should be the next step in your optimization campaign. For non-competitive keyword phrases, the writing on the page alone can often bring in high rankings without any other special coding and Meta tagging. Once you've become familiar with the ins and outs of such writing, you'll be ready to focus on your title, description, and keywords-phrases tags, and other elements making up the header underlying your home page and other significant sections of your web site.

BACKGROUND>>

The world wide web (www), relative to the search engine community, has changed drastically over the past few years.  The most radical, but least obvious change is that the search engines no longer search the web as they did initially.  The reason for this is because there are so many pages (over 10 billion) on so many sites (over 240 million), each search engine and directory can only attempt to keep up with a limited percentage of the whole web, so they just try to keep up their end of things.  Sometimes several of them will band together to share information on products, services and information, but on the whole, each one is autonomous, doing as good a job as they possibly can. (Google only indexes four billion pages.)

The second major shift in doing business has been much more obvious, especially to those of us in the business. Whereas in the beginning, all search engines and directories were open to free and quickly achieved registrations, over a period of several years, most of the freedom and quickness slowly evaporated. The quickness was the first casualty. Sometime in 1999 the rate of new web sites gained acute status at around 15,000 per day. The search engines couldn't keep up.  Some, like AOL and MSN, stopped accepting registrations themselves, turning instead to others for new information.  The major SE's took longer and longer for submissions to become full registrations. Days became weeks, and weeks became months.  Quite often, submissions had to be done over and over again before registrations actualized.

Something had to give, and that something was freedom.  The search engines started to charge for registrations.  Paid for inclusion satisfies two needs, namely the need for the SE community to turn a profit, or at least cover costs, and the need to cull out the personal or otherwise relatively unimportant web sites. And this change did not happen overnight.  It happened over about a year to a year and a half, coincident in time with the stock market collapse of the dot coms.

Four years ago, my manual registration list for search engines and directories looked like this: Canada.com (to get more quickly to AOL recognition), Infoseek, Lycos, Alta Vista, HotBot, Excite, DirectHit, LookSmart, MSN, Netscape, Yahoo, The Yellow Pages, NBCi, the Open Directory Project (ODP), ComFind and NrthernLight.  Within this same time frame, FAST at alltheweb.com came on the scene, as did Google, Teoma and Inktomi.  Those who bit the dust include Canada.com, Excite, DirectHit, Infoseek, NBCi and NorthernLight.  The Yellow Pages, AOL, MSN and Netscape have become sub-repositories of sites listed with the Online Database Project (ODP).

As I write this article, only Google, Yahoo, AOL’s Yellow Pages, InfoUSA and the ODP are still open to free registrations.  The ODP takes months and months to recognize new registrations.  This is very frustrating to those of us in the search engine optimization (SEO) business as well as being doubly frustrating to clients. 

 Full report: for all of you who want to know

An eon ago in Internet time, but only a few months ago for us humans, we started receiving offers, for various fees and such, to assist us in getting our clients to the top of the search engine results on keyword searches. We were intrigued to say the least. Maybe you have also received such email and wondered what they were talking about. 

Let’s get back to the matter of email solicitations for search engine results on keyword searches. How can they offer so much we asked ourselves? As often as not we would mutually agree that it was all hog-wash, absolutely impossible to accomplish, and go on about our business of serving you, our clients, in the best ways we know how. But in the back of our minds these offers continued to perplex us. No one could guarantee results, could they?

As the designated hitter on search engine business for 310 Web Design Studio, I researched the web again for whatever answers there were. I re-visited all of the search engines and read again what they each had to say about their criteria for url inclusion and placement -nothing new. I then went back to the World Wide Web Consortium in Switzerland where Tim Bernerds Lee (the inventor of the Web and HTML) and his team of web wizards, which include Marc Andreessen (true genius and technical founder of Netscape), and who form most of the rules governing how web sites should be created and managed. Again, nothing new. Finally, I again visited with the Dublin Core Group, the American counterpart to the W3C.org, an organization that also helps to promulgate rules for better web sites, among which are the recommended elements for your "headers". 

These two groups are a significant authority for all professional web designers and search engine pursuers. Would you believe it? Nothing new in the way of information that would lead us as professionals to better do the job we have done for you in terms of placement results on keyword searches with the search engines. I even spoke (emailed) with Danny Sullivan and Robin Nobles, the two most obvious search engine specialists in our industry, but found out that they too were perplexed at these claims of guaranteed results. (Wait till they read what I'm getting to here.)

This information is important to your getting the final picture on GUARANTEED RESULTS. The area of interest for the search engines and directories on your site is called the header or <head>. In either Internet Explorer or Netscape the <head> can be seen on your home page by going to the top-most control bar, and accessing "View". In IE, access Source, in NN access Page Source. What you and the search engines see in the first part of the "code" is the <head>.  Now some of the search engines read all of the meta tag elements, some do not. For those that do not we have added the http-equiv as the last element in order to appeal to the search engines that do not read the meta name tags.

Now we come to the crux of this report to you, our clients. After you've seen the emails telling you that you do not have to pay if the results GUARANTEED to you do not happen with each search engine you choose, it takes some thinking to figure out just what the gambit is here. As professionals, we know that this promise is too good to be true, but what is going on?

Here it is: The company who has had us so puzzled requires the site owner to pay $300 per URL per top ten position on a keyword search, and $100 per URL for a top 20 position. After working in the area of e-commerce, and specializing in search engine registrations for over a year, my experience is that out of ten registration efforts, two or three will reach the top ten when using any of the major search engine companies and searching for keyphrases or pairs of keywords relative to the site. Another two or three will reach the top 20. The other four or five registration efforts fall between the cracks for a number of reasons during the first attempt.

For those who GUARANTEE results, it is all a matter of numbers, dollar numbers. It's just that simple. The people who promise results are not privy to a knowledge base of magic denied the rest of us. No way! If only two hit the top ten with 18 search engines and directories, as they normally would, that's $10,800. Another three in the top 20 yields $5,400. These people couldn't care less about the other five registrations that did not take hold. They've gotten what they came after - the url owner's money - at a price we would not dream of charging. A very clever business model, eh?

The way some companies can advertise "top 10/20 position for search engine results, or you don't pay" is simply a business model that is profitable because of the 20-30% of companies that actually do achieve the top positioning (and who knows for how long), they get paid enough to compensate for the 70-80% that don't.   Their results are the same as ours, it's just that our customers pay a fraction of what the GUARANTEE's are charging.

Let me close by saying that if you are serious about doing business on the Internet, and I certainly think you should be serious about the greatest market potential any of us have ever seen, then you will respond positively the next time I in  contact you about redoing your header to bring it in line with what the search engines are looking for. Beverly Hills 310 and Web Design Studio give you your money's worth.

On another front, the email solicitation companies I have been writing about also mention a "cloaking" technique that tailors your header code to match the requirements of each search engine spider, thus resulting in higher position results and preventing your competition from seeing what is in your header. Heady stuff and a neat-o feature for sure! Except that all of the search engines that pay any attention to what your keywords are use the same criteria, the same from search engine to search engine.

They look for a good title, one that does not just say "Welcome to ABC - home page", but goes the distance by saying "ABC - products and services online" (whatever those products and services might be). 

They look for a description which can be reported back to searchers with the results. This description should be appealing and information. Your site may very well get accessed first because it is worded in such a way as to be catchy. Search engines look for keywords and keyphrases which are closely linked with what you sell or promote and appear in text on your home page. Finally, search engines look for linkage from other sites to your site. They figure, and rightly so, that if a lot of people think your site is neat, then it probably is neat. Sites benefiting from this analysis are AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and a few others. This is a requirement hard for most of us to meet.

William Orr
Marketing
310 Web Design Studio

Directories and Search Engines Explained:

Directories are repositories of information about a web site, things like: company name, what business the company is in, and what words people are likely to use to find the products and services of the company. Someone has to register with these Directories for that information to be available to searchers. The Directories of importance are: Yahoo, The Yellow Pages and the Open Directory Project (ODP). The Open Directory Project lists by category all submitted sites by hits, links and tenacity of the site’s web masters.

Search Engines (SE's) are almost the same as the Directories, with one major exception. The SE's use a software-generated tool to find information on the Web. The generic name for this tool is "Robot" or "Spider". In a perfect world, the SE's would find your site and index your products and services without any registration, but it isn't a perfect world. We absolutely must register with the SE's just as we do with the Directories, although we do not enter the same details as we do with the Directories. The reason for this necessity is as follows: In the United States at present, there are 10 billion pages of information residing on over 140 million Web sites. This number is increasing at the rate of 15,000+ pages per week. Because the Search Engine companies use people to edit all of the information about a site generated by the Robots, these companies are falling further and further behind. Without prodding them with a registration, they would not find your site in a hundred years (hyperbole, perhaps, but it makes the point).

The Search Engine company who is the most popular and who, along with the Directories listed above, handle some 95% of all Web inquires, is Google.  MSN, Lycos, HotBot, All The Web (FAST), Ask Jeeves and others still exist, but one wonders about their staying power.

There are many web designers who do not understand the logic of what I've just said. Sometimes I think that 90% of them seem not to care for anything other than inspiring graphics and inter-operability between pages on a site. They do not keep up-to-date with the controlling authorities of the World Wide Web such as the W3C.org consortium in Switzerland or the Dublin Core Group in America. These two groups set the standards for communication and searching on the Web, and they are adamant about having certain information located in a certain way and at a certain place on home pages for the Search Engines to look for the information, products, and services being offered online.

Meta Tags are the links between your site and it's exposure on the Internet. By helping Search Engines & Directories list and find you we help drive traffic to your site, and traffic is the key to growth, sales, and profits online. When someone goes on-line and enters a search request, the meta tags we in-code to your site are the key to your being found.

As clients of 310 Web Design Studio, you are lucky to have a team working for your success that very much appreciates these beginning steps into what is called e-commerce or e-business. I say beginning, because without the fullest amount of information located in what is called the header code behind your home page, your site is not fully functional on the Web. It's as though you were on this information super highway with the little wheels new cars now have for spare tires. Sure, you can go 40 mph, but you can't go flat out like you want to.

Links, We cannot close without mentioning links. Almost all of the Search Engines look for linkage between your site and other sites. They sense that more linkage means more interest on the part of a greater portion of web users. I think they are correct in their assumption. We need to be aware of where such linkages exist between your site and those of customers, suppliers, similar sites that are not really competing with yours, and industry directories. You need to link with as many of these as possible.

William Orr, Marketing
310 Web Design

Today's very best online strategy for dominating your market niche........over the long run!

Perhaps you've noticed how we've discussed, encouraged, and recommended that online businesses strive to create a ring of interconnected websites, each rich in content and each 
linked together. 

Done correctly, you multiply your online presence, increase your online visibility, and boost your keyword relevancy in the search engines due to increased link popularity. True, none of this happens overnight but of course that's also true when building any facet of any business. Success comes from laying out a solid long term plan and then systematically seeing that plan through to the end. Without a doubt, this is one such strategy that, in the long run, holds great promise for building an online dynasty within your niche market. 

How to begin... 

The first step is to map out a ring of domains, preferably keyword rich URLs that cover different, but related facets of a product or service. Because I'm being general I'll simply pretend we are selling the proverbial widget. 

Therefore, we'll create one domain that is a widget sales site. Another domain contains technical information about widgets. Still another is about consumer comments and information regarding widgets. Still another domain could be a forum and support site about widgets. Finally we might just have a FAQ site about widgets. 

The important point is that we have several related but seemingly independent sites all pertaining to a different aspect of the same subject. The domains' URL's could look something like this... 

http://www.widgets-online.com 
http://www.widget-tech.com 
http://www.widget-reports.com 
http://www.widget-forum.com 
http://www.widget-faqs.com 

Of course, as you've no doubt guessed, we find a graceful way for each of these sites to "point" at each other by cross linking them and we make extra sure they point to our widget sales site. 

Simple so far? ...Okay, pay close attention here because if you miss these steps the strategy won't work very well -- or even at all. 

1.It's important that each of these sites are content rich. 

Gone are the days when you can put up a page that simply points to another page and gain any significant relevancy. Each of these sites must have a clear purpose and provide unique
relevant content about widgets. 

2.Each of these sites should be hosted by different web hosting services. 

Here's why. In order for the search engines to see the links as highly relevant --what they call "expert" links -- the IP Address of each site must be located within a different Class C block of
IP addresses than the site that is being pointed to. 

Here's a chart to help you understand how IP blocks work... 

255.255.255.YYY 
Y's identify last octet
sometimes referred to as the host 
255.255.XXX.YYY 
X's identifies the class-C subnet 
255.XXX.XXX.YYY 
X's identify the class-B subnet 
XXX.XXX.XXX.YYY 
X's identify the Class A subnet 


The strategy is to insure that none of your "expert" domains are on the same Class C block. And the best way to insure they aren't is to host them in different locations. 

3.To be absolutely positively certain your sites will not be seen as duplicates intended to artificially boost relevancy, they should each be registered in the whois registry database to 
different "owners". 

Of course, many people consider this to be too much trouble. If you are one of those then go ahead and take the risk by foregoing this extra layer of detection-protection. Chances are, it 
will still work-- at least in the short term. 

Keep in mind, however, that at some point the engines and directories may start cross-checking with the whois database and when they do, you'll possibly lose some very fine listings that you've worked hard to secure and perhaps even come to depend on. 

We've always operated on the notion that if they can find it, they eventually will. Therefore, in strategies such as these, we plan for the long haul and recommend that you do too. Strive to
configure your web-ring to be as undetectable as is reasonably possible -- and the best way to do this is to register each related domain to a different "owner". Each can be a subsidiary
of your main company if you like. 

One strategically very good reason for doing this pertains to getting multiple Yahoo listings. You see, Yahoo's policy is one listing per company. Never mind that your company may sell
multiple products or provide multiple services. Never mind that each of these products or services have their own unique keywords and key phrases. Yahoo isn't fazed. They want your listing to be your company name and they insist that each company have only one listing in their directory. 

The way around it is to make each site look like it is owned by a different unique company -- preferably a company with the keywords in the company name. 

Using our example, we might name our "companies"... 

Widgets, Inc. 
Widgets Technical, LLC 
Widget Consumer Information Services 
Widgets Forum and Reports 
Widget Watch 

The beauty of having multiple Yahoo listings is that Yahoo is an 800 pound gorilla in terms of link relevancy. That means that a, Yahoo link to your site makes your site look more relevant in the eyes of the other search engines and directories. In addition, having a link to your site from other sites that are listed, by Yahoo (your web-ring sites) will add additional layers of
relevancy to your site. 

If you can manage to get multiple sites listed in Yahoo, AND link each of these sites to each other, the overall boost in link relevancy can be substantial. This is a solid long term
search engine strategy well worth the extra effort because it is likely to remain the link-relevancy standard for the foreseeable future. 

Be certain to avoid this pitfall... 

Some web hosting services stack several domains on the same IP address -- this is known as virtual hosting and it is a bad idea from a search engine optimization perspective. We've discussed the reasons in the past but suffice it to say that your domain should be
hosted on its very own, unique IP address. 

Be certain to make this very clear when setting up your sites. Tell the hosting service that you do NOT want to share an IP address with another domain. Yes, it may be cheaper to do so but remember there's usually a good reason why services are cheaper and in this case the savings aren't worth it. 

How to determine your site's IP address 

To determine your site's IP address, simply open a DOS window and at the C Prompt, type ping yourdomain.com. 

The example above shows the IP address of searchengine-news.com to be 209.204.233.36 

Conclusion 

As the science of online marketing continues to mature, one fact stands tall in the forest of theory and misinformation. When customers go searching online for products and services they're in the most receptive mood possible to buy! And, search engines are the online consumer's tool of choice -- 85% of all purchases start with using a search engine. 

By creating multiple paths leading to your virtual storefront, you significantly increase the odds that new customers will find you. In the final analysis, this is the very best insurance that your online business will not only survive, it'll thrive -- now and well into the future. Use this
strategy to play your cards right and you'll undoubtedly dominate your niche! 


For more information or questions regarding the above please e-mail:
bill@310webdesign.com

Stay awake at the wheel....

For information or questions regarding the above information please e-mail:
bill@310webdesign.com