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Net Watch Article - Search Engines p2

Will they ever make up their minds? That is the question that I keep asking myself when the major search engines keep changing how they do things. From as way back as I can remember, webmasters have been pushing the envelope to get their sites at the top of the list. Many techniques have come and gone and now they are, yet again, taking away another. Over the past several years we have had some real success due to our marketing of clients home page as well as the sub pages within the site. Most clients have seen site traffic double, triple, and even quadruple in a year. Well those days are over, things are changing. Actually I understand their reasoning, I just don’t like it. This is the scoop. The major search engines have started or will be starting to penalize sites that send them multiple pages. They are going to start dropping them in the ranking or dropping them completely from their listings.

Their justification is that there are just too many pages being sent to them to handle. They all use spiders or little programs that look at your site once you send it to them, so there should be no reason to send multiple pages. Where things get real confusing is who is following what guidelines. For that reason, organizations such as http://dmoz.org/ have sprung up to act as a main database for other search engines to pull from. With DMOZ, you send your site to them, when they get around to looking at it several weeks later, you may or may not get added, and then you may or may not get picked up by search engines that use them. It is a real mess.

All of this can be conquered if you are willing to send a bunch of money. You can pay for keywords at google, yahoo, altavista, msn, etc. paying per ‘click-through’ from those keywords. (A ‘click-through’ is when your site comes up at the very top of the search engine and someone clicks on it to go to your site.) On the surface this may seem to be a good idea. I have a client that pays $.50 every time someone clicks through their keyword on yahoo. What happens if they get 200 click-throughs in a day? The product they are selling only sells for $3.25 or so, seems like they may make more sales but lose a nickel on each one in the long run.

So now that you’ve heard the bad news, how do we cost effectively get our sites out there. The new answer to the problem is more in the design of the site than in the saturation of the search engines with all your pages. In my research one common theme keeps coming to the top. “Content is King“ If you don’t have good content, hang it up. Also, if you have not prepped every aspect of your site to be “spider friendly” you are wasting your time. Fortunately we have been thinking this way for our clients from the beginning. For those clients that use us to submit your sites to the search engines, we have modified your marketing profiles in our submission software to comply with our new findings.

If you’d like to talk to us about performing a marketing compatibility audit on your site, or would like to talk to us about marketing your site, please give us a call or send us an email. We will keep everyone posted as we continue to research the best ways for your site to be a success.