Down And Dirty Guide to Search Engines

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Down and Dirty Guide
to Search Engines

© 1999 Mark Joyner

Folks, volumes can be written about search positioning.  And volumes *have* been written!  I should know, I wrote a lengthy e-book about it myself called Search Engine Tactics.  This was the book that started the e-book marketing craze way back in 1995.   It's been downloaded over one million times and was awarded 5 Stars by ZDNet - the only e-book ever to receive this distinction.

However, I've been asked here to sum up what everybody needs to know in a short article.  It's a tall order, but I think we can do it.   Let's get down to business.  I will simply provide you with a set of rules which you can apply for immediate results.

1. This discussion will focus on spider engines.  That is, an engine that goes to your site and indexes you based on what it finds.   Directories are a whole 'nother ball game (which we will address in another article).  Good examples of spiders are: Infoseek, Excite, and AltaVista.

2. Every search engine is different.  You need to learn the "algoritm" used by each engine to rank pages.  An algorithm is simply a set of rules.

3. These algorithms change constantly.  This is why tips like "put 3 % of your target keyword in your title tag" are probably worthless by the time you hear them.

4. The only reliable way to learn a site's algorithm is to analyze actual results of a search on that engine.  This must be done using a reliable keyword density analyzer.  This tool will show you the weight of particular keywords in high ranking documents.   You then simply reproduce this weight in your document to attempt to reproduce the results.  Any advice you find that did not come from an actual analysis is probably smoke and mirrors.   This method is very reliable.  There are a few other factors that will affect rank that can not be measured this way (link popularity, spam filtering, etc.), but keyword density is the easiest to measure and most reliable factor.

5. You should not only be concerned with the rank of your listing, but with the way it appears in the engine as well.  If your listing is #1, but looks like a bunch of junk (try a search right now and you'll see what I mean), it will be a waste of your time.   The appearance of your listing depends on two of three things:

"A" above is what the engine links to your page. B or C are used as descriptive text for your link. You must balance your work on these tags. That is, sometimes what gets you a high rank will not make for an enticing listing. Remember that your title is most important. Think of it as a headline for an ad.

6. No software in itself is going to get you a high position on a search engine. Period. There are a great number of software products out there claiming to get you higher position on the web. For the most part, save your money. There are really only two programs you need (and you *may* not even need them-when a company selling you software tell you that you may not need - you should listen!):

A keyword density analyzer. You don't really need this if you have some other tool that will allow you to analyze the composition of any text. If what I just said flew over your head, a keyword density analyzer is for you. Here is the only one I use (Yes, we sell it. For a good reason):
http://foreverweb.com/cgi-foreverweb/kda.cgi?IM6980

A site submitter. You don't really need one of these, either, if you are strictly focusing on a high position in the spider engines. You can probably submit these pages one by one just as easily seeing as the process of gaining a high rank is a surgical one. However, if you need to submit many pages at once (if you do it will save time), or you want to submit to other types of site (the best submitter submits to over 900 sites and spider engines account for about 12 of those), then it is a good idea to get some software that will automate this task for you. I recommend Global PromoBot. It is genuinely one of the few programs I use over and over again. Any campaign we conduct begins with a GPB submission to get a broad general coveage in as many places as possible: (Yes, we sell this. And, yes, there is a reason why this is the only submitter we sell.)
http://foreverweb.com/cgi-foreverweb/spider_click.cgi?IM6980

Now, some people in the know are probably going to be up in arms about my over-simplification of this process. There is, of course, much more to it than I have listed here, but this information will get you started on the right track.

All the best,

Mark

Mark Joyner
CEO, Aesop Marketing Corporation

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The entire contents of this article Copyright © 1999 Aesop Marketing Corporation. Please feel free to share this article with your friends or post it on your site as long as it is left intact with all links unchanged and this notice.

Down and Dirty Guide to Search Engines

Down and Dirty Guide
to Search Engines