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Are the Search Engines and website
promotion important? Undoubtedly, positively,
absolutely....YES! Here's how important they are. In the
recent Georgia
Tech Internet User Survey, respondents were
asked how they find pages on the Internet. A full 82% said
they used the major search engines. The only response that
was higher was following links from other sites (at 88%) and
this is the first time in 10 surveys that anything ranked
higher than search engines. By the way, these numbers don't
include people that use directories such as Yahoo to find
sites. These accounted for another 63% in the survey. So,
the major search engines can not be ignored
Want to know
more about the Georgia Tech Internet User Survey? Click
here.
What are the Major
Search Engines?
If search engines are important, than the more search
engines I'm on, the better, right? Well, not really. Over
90% of this flood of people looking for websites come
through a handful of search engines. The important ones are
Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, AskJeeves, Overture, Infospace,
Netscape, AltaVista,
and Overture. There are literally hundreds of other search
engines, but these are the ones that require special effort
to attain those top rankings for your keyword phrases.
How Much Traffic Can
I Get Through Search Engines?
Of course, it depends on your site and what keywords
people will use to find you. But we've seen a top ten
placement for a keyword literally double a website's traffic
overnight. The key is to pick your keywords wisely and then
achieve at least top 30 (and preferably top 10) rankings on
these all important search engines for these keywords.
The other important thing to note is
that the quality of traffic from search engines is much
greater than from other sources of online advertising. For
more, read the results
of the study by the NPD group.
Finally, search engine marketing is
the most cost effective form
of online advertising..costing as little as 5 cents a
visitor.
For tips and
strategies for picking your keywords, click
here.
How Do You Position
My Site on these Search Engines?
Search Engine Positioning refers to a program where
we actively optimize
your site in order to improve it's rankings on
search engines for certain keywords. Each search engine has
different ways to determine which sites will rank well for
these keywords. We use pages inside your site, as well as create new pages
(see Consultation and Development of Keyword Rich Content), and make sure these
pages have these keywords in key places so they'll rank well
on search engines.
In addition to this, we also
put your site in our link exchange program so we can build
links back to your site from sites all over the world. This
is quite important, because many search engines, including
Google,
Infoseek, AltaVista and Hotbot, consider sites that have
several links to them more likely to be relevant than less
popular sites. Therefore, the more popular the site, the
higher it will rank in these search engines.
We also submit your site to
directories such as Yahoo and the Open Directory Project.
Again, having your site in these directories can drive an
amazing volume of traffic to your site and increase your
rankings on search engines.
For more about
our strategies, click
here.
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