Marketing your website

Search Engines are very important for getting visitors to a website.

Different search engines have different rules that determine the visibility they give to different web sites; and those rules can change from time to time: without warning.

A site may have a high visibility on a search engine one month; and a low visibility the next…

It is very important to understand how search engines work.

Some search only within their own database. Other search engines search within both their own database, and also databases of other search engines. The scope and nature of data being searched, both have a significant affect upon the value of the search. Some search engines tend to have higher profile (such as Google), and attract more visitors than others. The number of visitors to a search engine does not alone determine it’s value. A search engine that attracts smaller numbers, but a specific type of visitor (who is more relevant to you), will be of greater value for you to have a listing with.

Basic Understanding

There are two major types of search engine :

Directories
To get listed in these search engines, you must submit your website (or web page) to the service to be manually reviewed and listed. Yahoo is the largest directory and charge a fee for their services. Some directories organize all types of websites into different categories.. others are more specific and list only websites from certain areas of interest (such as a directory that lists only car sites).
Crawlers
Crawlers are search engines that have a ‘spider’ program that goes out and indexes pages it finds on the internet (such as Google and MSN). To get started you can (but don’t have to) submit your website to the crawler. Once your site is in the crawlers ‘to do list’ it will ‘crawl’ through your site and index as much information as it can (depending on the specific rules of the crawler). When a crawler reaches your site, it tries to follow all of the links to each page and collect data on each page. Crawlers also follow links to external sites to link them as well.
This is very important to understand as many search engines put more ‘popular’ sites further up their lists. What this means is that if your site has links coming from various external sites (and the crawler finds your site through these links), it will regard your site as ‘popular’.

This is why sites like Microsoft and IBM list so high in their categories; they have thousands of other websites linking to theirs. NOTE: Many search engine directories use data from other crawlers as ‘secondary data’ when someone performs a search.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are a group of words and phrases plus a short summary that describes the contents of a web site. They are written at the beginning of the site’s programming; in the programming language (HTML), but are not visible to anyone looking at the website as they surf the net.

Some 'crawler' search engines access the meta tags, and use them as a reference for categorizing a site, and where that site should be listed in their database.
Many crawlers also index on other data in a web page such as the ‘alt’ tags for images plus heading and title tags. Different meta tag rules apply to different crawlers and the rules keep changing..

It is important to liaise with your web developer to get the meta tags right for each and every page of your website. For some search engines, the correct choice of words for your meta tags is essential in getting your site indexed and therefore found by your target audience.

Evaluation / Review Services

There are many sites on the internet that offer free evaluation services.
In most cases, it is a simple matter of typing in your web address and they will review your site then list it in their directory. Highly popular review directories such as Lycos and Yahoo charge for these services.

Paid Services

It is important to thoroughly investigate the potential of different paid services before spending from your advertising budget. Services such as paid listings (such as Lycos, Yahoo, etc), Adwords (Google), Banner Ads, Advertorials in email newsletters, etc. can benefit some products and services if they are targeted and planned correctly. Mantis Technologies can easily assist you to ensure you get maximum return on investment in these areas.

FFA (free for all)

Many people have differing views on FFA (free for all) submission sites but this is mainly due to misunderstanding how search engines work.

As mentioned before, many search engines take ‘popularity’ into account when organizing their listings.

FFA’s are seen as a great way to get your popularity up by getting your site listed (and therefore linked) on hundreds of websites. One important thing to remember though is that the FFA databases are often used by spamming companies to grab email addresses.. It is best to use an email address that is not frequently used when submitting sites to FFA’s to avoid filling your inbox with spam (junk mail).

Also, very important to remember... some search engines (Google in particular) actually penalize you for listing on an FFA. When indexing your site, Google cross references against it's database of 'link farms' and penalizes your listing if you are found in one or more link farms. Links farms are any site which most of it's page is devoted purely to link lists (this includes all FFA sites).

It is actually better to get a few decent links with sites that rate well in the search engines themselves rather that hundreds of links on FFA sites!

Reciprocal Links

Another great way to get traffic (and also make your site more popular from a crawlers point of view) is by using Reciprocal links. Basically, you need to have a links page on your website and then go out and find other websites with similar (but not competitive) themes to your own.

Most people are happy to supply a link to your website if you do the same as this is a win-win situation for both parties. Remember though that large corporate websites often will not want reciprocal links as they already have the high traffic that they need (plus they do not want to give free promotion to other websites when they are trying to sell advertising in the form of banner ads or advertorials).

It is important to develop a plan to regularly submit your website to search engines and other sites in order to stay successful. It is also equally important to stay abreast of current rules and trends regarding search engines.

Things like repeatedly submitting the same site to the same search engines or using repetitive keywords may seem like a good idea at the time but can actually have a negative effect in the long run. Some sites such as Altavista reject and ban websites for multiple submissions or repetitive keyword meta tags.