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Ask Judy Question #4

Dear Judy: My website has been online now for more than 6 months. In that time, I've had 127 visitors. Most of them are probably me checking to see if anyone has come to visit. The site looks great, but why is no one coming? What can I do?

Responses by Judy Vorfeld, Marc Holt, and Rick Thompson.

Dear Troubled: Sounds like my experiences when I was starting out. But I determined that I would learn and learn, and that hasn't stopped. You can do that, too. Ask yourself why you have the site.

What is your main goal? Have you created a site that is easy for visitors to use? Can they tell, first page, first fold, why your site is there, and how you can help them solve their problems or fill their needs? Have you shown them that you are a responsible member of the Internet community? Have you made ways for them to know about you and contact you? Are your words clear and to the point? Are your graphics attractive but not distracting? I could go on and on, but I'll let Marc Holt tell you about some other important issues.

Dear Troubled: You will often see a 'visit counter' on many websites. Unfortunately, most of them show abysmal numbers of visitors. One site I visited recently showed just 1,800 visitors since 1998. That's not many, is it?

A lot of these websites are usually just an online brochure. They contain no interesting content, so how do they expect visitors to return?

And this is what the search engines think too. The only way you will find these websites is to search for their domain name. If you search for a key word associated with their business, they will be listed so far down that it would take you half a day of viewing results pages before finding them.

There are so many millions of websites online these days that any company wanting to get noticed on the internet needs professional help to get listed high. Gone are the days when you could just sit down, visit a search engine and click on 'Add Site' to get accepted immediately and listed within the top 20.

Traditionally, search engine registration has been free. It was a simple matter to register your website and see it listed at or near the top of the SE results. But over the last 12 months this has changed. These days, a number of the top search engines demand a fee just to consider your website quickly. There isn't even a guarantee they will list your site, despite paying a fee.

Even directories like Yahoo.com are getting into the act. They now charge any business website $US199 to submit a website for consideration. If they don't like your website, you lose your money and don't get listed. But they aren't as tough as that statement sounds. Each website is reviewed by a human being and they will write back to you with suggestions to improve your website to comply with their listing rules. As long as you make the changes within 30 days, they will accept your submission for consideration again.

HOW THE SEARCH ENGINES WORK

Search engines send out a 'spider' to look at your website when you register. They also send the spider out after your site is listed whenever it senses changes in your page content.

The spider is actually a program with built-in instructions on what to look for. If it finds the right conditions in your website it will then add it to the database in the position it calculates your site deserves.

What do the spiders look for? That's a good question and one that the search engine sites won't answer. You have to figure it out and hope you get it right. Because each spider uses a different algorithm (set of program instructions), your website pages need to be optimized to suit different search engines. If you are not a professional, you could spend weeks experimenting and still not get it right. Add to this the fact that it can take weeks, or even months, to get listed at all and it's no wonder most companies hire a professional submission service to help them.

There are some things most spiders will look for, however. You need to have the META tags at the top of your web page set up correctly. But not all spiders look for them.

Have you got 200 key words listed in your META tags? Too many. Each search engine sets the number of key words it looks for. Most look for no more than 150 characters.

Your description should also contain as many key words as possible without losing readability.

You need to repeat the same key words as many times as possible in the text. The more times you repeat them, the higher your website will get ranked. But again, not all search engines use this criteria. And you have to be careful that the search engines don't think you are trying to 'spam' them with too many key words, or you won't get listed at all.

Some spiders look for header tags (H1, H2, etc) at the top of a web page. If they aren't there, your site gets penalized. Or they may weigh up how many other sites you are linked to. Other spiders look for a combination of some or all of these factors.

The names you give your pages is important too. Using key words in the page name can help you get a higher ranking.

In an effort to squeeze as many key words into a page as possible, some unscrupulous people tried changing the text color to the same color as the background and reducing the text to the smallest possible size. The search engines soon caught onto this little trick. If you try this you will be penalized and in all probability your website will not be listed at all.

Most importantly, you should change your page content as often as possible. Every time you upload a revised page, that little spider will come scuttling over to take a look and then decide where to list you.

CONTENT

Interesting content is what draws visitors back to your website: Not pretty pictures. The more content you have, and the more often you add new content, the more people will want to return. And this is what the search engines like too.

How could a company that sells football kit shirts online add more content? They could have pages with lots of information about the major football teams: Information about the players, club history, and so on, will entice visitors to return. They could have a ticker running across the page showing the latest game scores and league rankings. They could even add a chat room or bulletin board so that visitors can interact with the site and with each other. There really is no limit, except your imagination.

Many search engines also count the number of pages in a website. The more pages you have, the higher you get ranked. So it pays to have lots of content pages.

DOORWAY PAGES

Obviously, you can't set up your website pages to suit all search engines. In fact, your current pages probably don't satisfy all the requirements of more than 2 or 3 search engines. So, what can you do?

This is where the professional search engine registration companies really earn their money. They make special 'doorway' pages. Each of these pages is optimized for a particular search engine using specific key words. After the pages are uploaded to your server they visit each search engine and register the appropriate page. A professional search engine registration company will not only create these doorway pages for you, they will change them at least once a month, or make new ones for you as needed.

Obviously, getting ranked high in the SE results is a game. If you don't know the rules it can make playing almost impossible. And that's how your website can get lost in the crowd.

Hi, Troubled. Thousands of detailed articles have been written on the subject of search engines. The goal of this message to you is not to be an HTML lesson but to boil it all down to the basic facts and dispel a couple of commonly held myths.

Myth # 1. Search engines will list you quickly at no cost.

If you have a few thousand dollars to spend, you could achieve a decent footprint in the search engines within one month. This does not mean you can't get listed for free, it just takes a lot longer. Plan on a year of submitting your site every four to six months before you see any real results and at least three years before you have them all.

This is assuming of course that your site has content and is accepted for addition to the engines database. If you do not have useful content and acceptable code, most search engines will not list you, it's that simple. Just being in the search engines does not in itself guarantee traffic. Your pages and site design must be written correctly for good results and you need to obtain as many links as you can from other web sites. Many of the top engines use a popularity variable that looks for links to your site, obtaining links and site promotion in general is more important than ever now.

Myth # 2. Search engines listings will keep you in business.

We look at search engines as an essential but secondary supply of traffic. Most important are the direct links from other sites that have similar content as this traffic is targeted. You don't want to get into the mentality of depending on search engine listings because they constantly fluctuate.

Yes, occasionally you may want to make changes to your code to take advantage of new search engine trends or update keywords. Beyond that, just make sure you resubmit your site every four to six months to maintain your listing and monitor results with a logging or statistics script.

Getting Listed

With those two myths aside, let's talk about how to get listed most efficiently. First off, your pages must be written in a search engine friendly format including meta description and keywords.

It is beyond the scope of this message to go into what makes a page design search engine friendly. Methods change constantly to keep up with engine technology and in my opinion, chasing them is asking for needless frustration. The basics always apply, there must be text links that traverse your entire site, alt text should be used on images and the meta tags must be in place.

There are two ways to submit your site, you can compile a list of engines and go to each one or pay a submission service to do it for you. To manually submit and follow up listings is very time consuming, we use NetMechanic to list our sites with one hundred engines in about five minutes. A report is issued and there are always ten to twenty that had problems for various reasons. These can be resubmitted in a day or two and the new report that is generated will filter the sites that were temporarily down leaving a list to manually follow up on.

NetMechanic.com is a good submission tool and they have a demo that will list your site on a dozen of the most popular engines for free. In addition to submission, they have features for checking keyword popularity, meta tags, optimization and tracking. There are many other submission services, which one you use is your choice but plan on using one and shop around for features.

Maintaining your listing on each engine is important. Resubmit your site every four to six months or every time you make significant changes. Another nice thing about submission services is that they will keep your data intact so resubmission is quick and easy.

Summary

Getting listed and staying listed with the major search engines is simply a byproduct of running a well designed website with content over a long period of time. If you can afford it, paying for listings will speed up the process but nothing will guarantee traffic.

Concentrate on building your site and making it a valuable asset for any search engine to offer its users. At the same time use an efficient service and be persistent with your submissions.

Watch your statistics so you know exactly where your traffic is coming from but don't become obsessed with them. Put your effort into site promotion, popularity is very important to search engines so every link you obtain is valuable.

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