e-Marketing - Search Engine Strategies

Most people use a search engine (such as Yahoo!, WebCrawler, or Google) to surf the Net; it is vital to “advertise your web site to web search engines” (Wilson, Eight 1). The trick is doing it right.

Promoting a Web site through search engines can take patience and money. Results of searches are listed by matching “targeted keywords” in domain names, as well as “META tags” (Beal 1). META tags are HTML tags on the site that are hidden from view and describe the content and other aspects of a web page. Search engines use META tags to rank web pages in search results. There are three important META tags used by search engines when ranking pages. One is the title tag, visible at the top of the browser window. The description and keyword tags are hidden and are not displayed by the web browser. The description tag includes a short text description of the page. The keyword tag includes a list of key terms related to the page. Taking the time to write fully descriptive keywords will improve a site’s position on search engines, but META tags and descriptive keywords will not guarantee success in marketing via search engines. The following example shows how a computer supply company did almost everything correctly, yet suffered from the one thing they failed to do:

• You purchase an optimized domain name [a domain matching your keywords], research your keywords and optimize your META tags. Then you go and blow it all by creating a Web Site that is full of images, with very little text and not one mention of computer supplies (Beal 2).

Search engines scan the text within a site before it is displayed on a results page. If the text has nothing to do with the keywords, the site will receive a lower position. The page content, description META tag, keyword META tag, and title tag all are important in determining page ranking in search results. Page content is vital.

Another marketing tactic is paying for placement. Search engines like Overture.com offer advertisers paid placement in the top three results for various keywords. Advertisers bid on the amount they are willing to pay per click for traffic from the placement. For example, to be the first result under the keyword MP3, MP3GrandCentral pays sixty-three cents per click (Owens).

Another way to increase targeted site traffic is to pay for keyword buys. This tactic places an advertisement on the results page for various keywords. For example, when a user searches for “domain” on Excite, the results may return an ad for register.com, a domain registrar (Owens).

Unless you spend more money, you may wait a long time for a search engine to review your site, much less give it a high position on the results page. “You may even have to pay them $199 to agree to consider within one week whether to advertise your site,” warns Dr. Wilson (Wilson, Eight 2). Paying the application fee helps promote immediate review and search engine posting.

The search engine strategies best suited to your site will depend on the resources available to you. While optimization, the practice of tweaking META tags to improve rankings, is the least costly approach to using search engines, it is incredibly difficult to do right. It has created a cottage industry of search engine optimization services such as Microsoft’s b-central service. To get an idea of the complexity involved in good rankings, one need only visit the search engine features page at SearchEngineWatch.com. Because many web sites are registered with search engines, budgeting money for strategies, such as pay-per-click and keyword buys, is a good idea.

Search engines are a great place to begin, but “marketing on the Web should encompass more than search engines” (Sullivan, title 3). Because only 7-8% of website traffic is generated by search engines, a wide variety of other marketing techniques, on- and off-line, should be used to promote a web site (Sullivan, Direct).