Search Engines

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Search Engines

• How to make them work for you...

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Why use a search engine?

• Finding information on the Internet
• Ranked by relevance
• search term (key words)
• weighted by appearance and placement of key
  words.
• Ranked by Popularity
• Google, Direct Hit
• Ranked by
• Overture, Looksmart (Looklistings)

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Who are they?

• There are NOT 300,000 search engines!
• The TOP 8
• 1. Yahoo
• 2. Google
• 3. MSN
• 4. AOL
• 5. Altavista
• 6. Go Network (Infoseek)
• 7. Lycos
• 8. Excite
• represent 88.86 of all search engines.
• What SE do you use?

Get a flood of traffic to your website ! Submit
your site to 300,000 search engines only 58 !!!!
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Spider v Directory and why should I care?

• Spider Engine
• travels the web
• follows links
• reads content of your pages
• determines ranking based on what it finds on your
  pages
• will list ALL your pages in its engine
• Eg. Google, Altavista, All the Web

• Directory
• takes listings that are submitted directly
• placed by categories e.g.
• personalgt healthgt public health
• usually home page only represented (more for )
• does not read content of your pages
• determines ranking based on keywords found in
  category, description and title.
• Eg. Yahoo, ODP, Looksmart

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Anatomy of a SE Optimisation Project

• 1. Determine Key Words
• 2. Submit to Directories
• 3. Get Links
• 4. Optimise Web Pages
• 5. Submit to Spider Engines

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Determine Keywords

• What are people actually searching for?
• Dont focus on Business Name
• Research using objective tools e.g. Wordtracker
• Choose popular, relevant, non-competitive
  keywords.
• Weave those terms into your pages.

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What are people searching for?
Determine Keywords ...

• Research using www.wordtracker.com
• Initial keyword asthma

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Choose your Keywords
Determine Keywords What are people Searching
for?

• Theme Related
• Popular
• Low Competition (use wordtracker or observe
  number of results when you search)

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Put your keywords in...
Determine Keywords What are people Searching
for?

• For Directories
• Category
• Title
• Description
• Domain name

www.technologymatters.com.au
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Directory example...
Determine Keywords What are people Searching
for?
Category Title Description
www.technologymatters.com.au
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Submit to Directories

• 1. ODP (open directory project)
• 2. Looksmart via ZEAL
• 3. Yahoo!
• 4. Relevant industry portals

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Get Links
Q Why? A Link Popularity and referred traffic

• Q How?
• 1. Freely distribute articles with in-built links
  to your website.
• 2. Use keywords in the link text rather than
  organisation name or domain name
• 3. Ask to be linked in their links/resources page
• 4. Offer reciprocal links
• 5. Submit link pages to Google

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Link Text
www.technologymatters.com.au
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Put your keywords in...
Optimise your pages

• For Spider Engines
• lttitlegt
• ltMetagt description
• Headings lth1gtlth2gt
• Body text
• Link text
• Domain name
• ltmetagt keywords are a low priority
• Dont over-do it!

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SEs love standard HTML but stumble over.
Optimise your pages

• Frames (use the ltnoframesgt tag to insert content)
• Flash
• Lots of Javascript
• Dynamic pages (generated from a database)
  particularly containing special characters like ?
  
• Images containing text (the S.E cant read the
  text in the image)

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Submit to the Spider Engines

• Submit base domain only to
• Google
• All The Web
• Lycos
• Submit individual pages to
• Alta Vista (www.altavista.com.au, free or
  express service)
• Inktomi (www.positiontech.com US39 25/page
  pa)
• Refer to handout for other engines and directories

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Monitor your position

• Review website statistics
• Many hosting companies provide, or
• Free stats from www.sitemeter.com
• Look for referrals
• Throw away your hit counter
• Check your rankings
• Top Dog (www.topdog.com US199)
• Web Position Gold (www.web-position-gold.biz
  US149)

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