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Search Engines and Search Engine Optimization
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SEARCH ENGINES
1 in 28 page views (3.5%) is a search page.
-Alexa
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Welcome to the WorldWide &#@! Web, where it takes just thirty seconds of a bumpy information expedition to transform some tech-loving clickaholics into lunatics, a survey has found. On average, Web-rage is uncaged after twelve minutes of fruitless searching, although 7 percent of the 566 people surveyed by Roger Starch Worldwide say ire starts rising after 3 minutes.
-Ben Chamy, The World Wide @#$#@$ Web, ZDNet News, 12-23-2000
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It is often quoted that the top 7 search engines account for 95% of web traffic combined; Yahoo!, AltaVista, Excite, InfoSeek, HotBot, Lycos and WebCrawler. Actually, Yahoo isn't really a search engine, but rather a directory. There are hundreds for you to choose from.
-Michael Wong (1998) What Are Search Engines And How Do They Work?
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Simultaneously, (Alta Vista) announced that it would continue to focus more on search, aiming for a "third generation" service that would intelligently determine what information best satisfies a user, such as automatically providing shopping results rather than web page matches or serving up different results based on a user's past queries.
Third generation? AltaVista defines the first generation of web search as service that relied upon analyzing the location and frequency of words on the page to determine ranking. The second generation is said to be the addition of off-the-page ranking criteria such as link analysis and clickthrough measurements. AltaVista hasn't yet rolled out portions of its third generation service...
-Danny Sullivan, The Search Engine Report, 10-3-2000
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GoTo is the clear leader in the pay-per-click space. That is to say, it's a search engine operated entirely on the premise of advertisers bidding on placement in search results... GoTo, like more than a few other Internet startups, is rampantly underestimated... Seems like I can't go anywhere without tripping over a "cloaked" pay-per-click result which drives traffic to a GoTo advertiser.... Some GoTo partners... make no mention that GoTo rankings are determined by a keyword auction to advertisers. Example: Ask Jeeves. Jeeves is supposedly this awesome search tool for the average user. Yet it now folds someone else's pay-per-click auction into their results to pick up a bit of spare change (while not being very forthright about that fact).
-Andrew Goodman, Traffick, 8-12-2000
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At the beginning of this year, none of the top ten most popular search engines had any type of paid placement program. Now, four of them do (AOL Search, AltaVista, Lycos, Netscape Search). The remaining six (Excite, Go, iWon, MSN Search, NBCi, Yahoo), still do not, but that's likely to change. (NBCi does carry paid listings, but not as prominently as the four previously named).
-Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Watch, 12-4-2000, "AltaVista Latest To Carry GoTo Paid Listings"
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SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
We estimate that more than 100 million queries are entered at search engines
worldwide every day. Because a majority of these searches result in
thousands, if not millions, of results, most content owners want their URLs to
filter to the top. That's where search-engine optimization enters the picture.
(based on a poll) The most common method used to improve a site's ranking involves metatags (61%), followed by tweaking page titles (44%). The results also show that marketers have not fully realized the growing significance of Google (which also powers Yahoo!). Google bases site popularity on the number of inbound links, not on site architecture.
-Iconopoll, Search Engine Optimization
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With more than 2 billion documents already on the Web and an additional 1 million pages added each day, a major part of Web site marketing involves letting the world know that a site exists, and then bringing in qualified leads to said site. While banner ads and offline marketing are obvious elements that effort, the stone that kills both birds is a prominent position on the right search-engine results list, since, according to studies by the Georgia Institute of Technology, a whopping 85 percent of all Internet users go directly to search engines to find what they are looking for online.
Those users are also much more likely to take an action when they get to the site they've selected from a keyword-search results list, says Andy Johns, chief financial officer of New York-based Internet technology and ad distribution company 24/7. "They are highly qualified leads: The person who has typed in that keyword is clearly motivated to follow through, so you don't just get a clickthrough, you get a dramatically increased rate of conversion after the click."
...(Search Engine Watch's Danny) Sullivan explains that, contrary to the persistent myth that search results are up for sale by most portals, achieving a prominent position requires technical finesse. It also requires the keyword matchmaking skills of a digital yenta.
"The core skills that a good SEO has-understanding how people search, how to place sites in areas where people are searching and how to target those sites toward particular terms that makes sense for the client-take time to develop, and most advertisers and agencies don't have the time to do that kind of research or develop that expertise," Sullivan says.
He points out that as recently as last year, when search engine positioning was still something of a cottage industry, positioning meant merely writing the right keyword meta tag (HTML characters and phrases that search engines "see" but users don't) on the right Web site page. "Three years ago, if you put a keyword meta tag containing five words on your page, you'd get a ranking for most of those words," Marckini says. "Of course there were only 100 million documents on the Web. Today there are 3 to 5 million indexed in the average search engine. As recently as a year ago, there were eight major search engines, now there are 20, including human-edited directories and portals with their own networks."
Who needs search engine positioning? "It cuts across all verticals and business categories," says Marckini. "No company that wants to thrive on the Web can do so without a top ranking on the major engines. You can spend a million or two on a Web site, but if you don't do the things you need to do to make it found in the major search engines in the top 30 matches, your million-dollar Web site is a billboard in the woods."
-Karl Greenberg AdWeek Online, IQ Interactive Report Analysis: Search Patterns
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You must also do a diligent search for the topical directories, engines, and web guides that are specific to your site's subject matter. For example, if you have a site related to sports, then just because you've never heard of SportSearch.com does not mean it isn't a great niche engine used by tens of thousands of people every day. In fact, it is. Go get your free listing. I am certain that as time goes on and the portals show search results only for a favored few sites, these niche engines will become more and more used and important.
Whether the search engines ever work out the kinks with link popularity measurements, if you have built a nice network of links pointing your site, you will still benefit from surfers' discovering you. Ižd rather have 1,000 links pointing to my site that no search engine ever finds than only 10 links that they do find. (It would be better, of course, to have both the 1,000 uncounted links and the 10 counted ones.
-Eric Ward, Link Popularity Is Not Your Only Linking Goal, 10-26-2000
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In an attempt to serve better search results, most of the major search engines are now employing a new technology that is commonly being referred to as "Search Engine Themes." As of 11/00, Google, Inktomi, Alta Vista, Excite and Fast are all
using themes in their algorithm. That means that the search results from smaller partners like 4anything, AOL Search, HotBot, GoTo, ICQ, LookSmart, MSN Search, and NBCi (Snap) are also at least partially based on themes technology. This change should not be taken lightly. The move to themes based indexing promises to change all of the 'norms' wežve accepted about search engine optimization...In other words, the name of the game is consistency, consistency, consistency. And if you are building a web site from scratch, this should be fairly easy to follow. Unfortunately, for many existing web sites this can present a very big problem....as theme based search engine technology continues to grow, we will more and more see doorway web sites making their entrance...
-J.K. Bowman, Search Engine Themes. Spider Food: Search Engine Optimization and Web Site Promotion
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CLOAKING
A key element of this case involves "cloaking." In cloaking, a search engine spider is sent a copy of a web page that's different than what a human visitor sees when viewing the same page. Search engine optimization companies employ cloaking for two main reasons. First, pages designed to rank well for search engines may not be attractive visually to humans, so cloaking keeps these ugly pages from being presented to human visitors. Second, many search engine optimization companies consider the work they do to be proprietary. They do not want their competitors to see how they've managed to achieve a top ranking.... Search engines generally do not like cloaking or even any use of "doorway pages" that are heavily engineered to achieve rankings for particular keywords, rather than to deliver actual information. However, they have been relatively sluggish in policing abuse, relying instead on making more use of "off-the-page" ranking systems to disarm the advantage that doorway pages used to provide.
-Danny Sullivan, ed., SearchEngineWatch.com, May 12, 2000
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The search engines are cracking down on any type of misleading redirection used by
marketers. In addition to cloaking, this includes fast meta refresh tags (using
doorway pages that immediately redirect you to another page) and Bait and Switch
(using an optimized page to achieve a high ranking for a keyword, then substituting
another page in it's place). Use cloaking and you run the risk of being banned from a
search engine...and you DON'T want this to happen!
-Online Marketing Monitor (2000)
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DOORWAY PAGES
...with that in mind the company should only create doorway pages for those
products which it considers to be most important. And you should only create
doorway pages that are honestly relevant to your site.
I say this because in some instances, there is a very gray line between when a
doorway page becomes spam. Each search engine has the authority to define
when you are spamming them. Also, some engines will only allow you to submit
a certain number of doorway pages. For example, HotBot puts the limit at 10.
Doorway pages which use the Meta Refresh tag to catapult a viewer from one
page to another might also be considered spam. This technique was abused
extensively by the XXX industry, and as a consequence, many engines now
consider any type of Meta Refresh spam. If you must redirect, use javascript or
some server side function and delay the redirect for as long as possible. A length
of 10 seconds should put you in the safe zone.
Doorway pages that appear to be identical to each other are also considered spam.
This most often occurs when a webmaster optimizes slightly different versions of
the same page to rank highly for a keyword phrase. If you've ever done a search
on the web and seen the same site listed over and over again in the search engine
results, you'll quickly understand why this type of behavior is frowned upon.
-J. K. Bowman, Doorway Pages, Spider Food, Search Engine tutorials and web site promotion.
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INTERNATIONAL SEARCH ENGINES
Non-English search engines, such as Yahoo Japan or Infoseek Brazil, will only accept your submission if your website is translated into the local language. Solution: Register a "jump page" in the local language, which will serve as your localized Home Page until the rest of your site fills out in that particular language. This will cost less than translating your entire site and save time.
-Clark Egnor, Marketing a New IEP
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OTHER LANGUAGES, .ASP, LOCALIZATION, ETC.
Language localization is the process of displaying the user interface in different languages depending on the locale that the application is being run from. Localization for Internet applications has long been a cumbersome and difficult task for developers to tackle. Many approaches have been made to make this functionality easier to implement and less
costly to maintain. In this article I will outline an approach to localization that can be used on enterprise class web applications. This approach will reduce code redundancy and total cost of ownership while allowing web developers to cut those long hours of head banging out of their day.
-Andrew Krowczyk, abstract for an article, Language Localization for Enterprise Web Applications, Wrox Publications, available only through membership
photo (Spider Web) by Jim Leverett
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