Search Engines

Research has found that at least 65% of traffic to websites derive from Search Engines. Search engines are very much a hit and miss thing and much experience & knowledge is needed to be able to optimise your site so it will be found in the first 10 listings. When there are 1000's of people selling the same product as you, what are the chances of your web site being displayed in the first 10 listings of your customer's search engine's results? To be in the top 10 you firstly need the search engine to find your site and then it needs to rank highly. Search engine optimisation really is specialist's field but that does not mean that the average person can't optimise his or site and get results.

Five simple points to remember when designing your website are:

  1. Only a handful of search engines use meta tags to locate web sites these days. You should include approximately 150 - 250 characters between the Title Metatags on every page and approximately 10 - 20 words between the Description Metatags. These words should include the main keywords/phrases that your customers are likely to enter into a search engine.
  1. Search engines also read text within your pages. Try to include at least 20 words on each page that relate to keywords and phrases in the first few lines. Once again don't repeat a word more than 3 times or some search may view this as spamming and give your site a low ranking. Preference is also given by some search engines to text contained within <h> and <b> tags.
  1. Titles are also very important as all search engines give relevancy to what is contained with in the title tags. Try to include key phrases in your title.

                               Example: <title> AA Imagination - web and print, web hosting, printed products, print solutions, packaging </title>

  1. Search Engine ranking is also determined by the number of websites linking to your site, particularly high traffic and well-known, high ranking sites. Networking with other local business to display links on each others page may improve your ranking. Remember it is better to aim for more links from high ranking sites and less from low ranking sites.
  1. Most Search Engines also use Text Link Analysis. They look at the text contained in the links of sites linking to your web site. Example: A link containing "best hamburgers". Whether the link to your site is from an external site or from another page in your own site, try to use key words/phrases in your links.

You can check your page rank on Google by downloading the Google toolbar from: http://toolbar.google.com

Another thing you can do that seems to improve page ranking is to list your site with the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org.

The 3 major Search Engines used in Australia are:

These 3 Search Engines account for over 98% of all searches made in Australia. There are many articles on the Internet that discusses search engines. Some good informative articles can be found at: www.akamarketing.com

 

Free Search Engine Submission

Note: Google is the only major Search Engine servicing the Australian market that still provides free submission.

Google

Alltheweb

Altavista

 

Pay Per Click Search Engines

PPC Search Engines were introduced effectively at the turn of the century and are very popular these days. With PPC Search Engines you can specify which country you wish to advertise in, the keywords and/or phrases that your search results will appear under, and the exact description of your site in search results and you only ever pay when someone actually clicks on a link to your page. Most PPC providers allow you to pay as little a $0.05 per click and you can often also cap the amount you spend per day.

If you capped a $0.05 per click plan at $1 per day that would be 20 potential customers physically seeking what you sell looking at your web site every day. I think that is money well spent. All comes back to the profit you make on your product and what your sales to visitor ratio is. If you made $100 per sale, then on a $0.05 plan you could have up to a 1:2000 ratio before making a loss. With a ratio like this you would have to be doing something very, very wrong but.

Try to use descriptions that will entice people to click on your link. For example. " 20% off this month" or "free shipping". The idea is not only to entice people to look at your page but too entice the right people. This means also that your product must be competitive as well as using the right key phrases to attract the right customer. There is no point paying for clicks that don't lead to sales so the idea is to keep that ratio down. Remember there are only so many people looking for your product per day so don't waste opportunities.

PPC Search Engines give preference to deep pockets. The more you pay per click, the more often your ad is going to be displayed so it can become a biding war between you and your competitors. PPC is not for everybody. It is best for products frequently sold or as an easy form of advertising that your competitors are not using yet. For more information on Yahoo and Google PPC systems, see below.

Yahoo Sponsored Search - Also appears in Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, CNN, etc

Google Addwords - Also appears in Google, AOL, Earthlink, etc

 

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