Chapter 10 How to Pull Traffic to Your Collection Site

jamesmaduk.com

How do you pull visitors into your site? How do you let potential prospects know you exist? Go where your perfect customer is looking for you. Without big business brand recognition, your customer is forced to look for you. Where do they look for you? Well, they do not actually look for you; they query search engines, search portals and web directories for information that allows them to solve their own problems. Making sure that your website shows up in the first couple of pages when they search is the key ingredient to pulling your visitors to your main theme site. Getting this traffic gives you the opportunity to capture e-mail addresses and build your list. How do you get your web pages into these engines and directories? More importantly, what should you submit to these engines and what will they show the visitors who are searching?

Search Engines

What is a search engine? A search engine is a group or collection of web applications that has a number of specific jobs. Search engines can:

1. Spider the Internet. This type of application crawls through the Internet going from page to page and following hyperlinks on each page looking for other links.
2. After the pages and links are collected, they are indexed.
3. These indexes can be queried. You type in a request for topics and the engines searches its index and then returns the relevant pages or documents.

Many search engines are advertised. There are only 6 that you need to worry about. Google, Inktomi, AltaVista, Alltheweb(FAST), Direct Hit and Ask Jeeves.

Key Point!
There Are Only 6 Real Search
Engines!

Many search engines are advertised. There are only 6 that you need to worry about. Google, Inktomi, AltaVista, Alltheweb(FAST), Direct Hit and Ask Jeeves.

Search Engine Portal

A search engine portal is similar to a search engine except it does not use its own spider to check Internet pages or documents. What it does do is provide a way to query other search engine indexes.

The major search engine portals include AOL Search, MSN Search, Lycos.

Directories

A website directory is different from a search engine. A directory is a list of websites checked and edited by real people. A directory is organized into categories, topics and subtopics. Many of the directories supplement their listings with additional pages from search engines. The major directories include Yahoo, DMOZ (Open Directory Project) and LookSmart.

Pay-Per-Click Search Engines

PPC or Pay-For-Placement, Cost-Per-Click are some other terms you may hear or see that refer to search engines that differ from a traditional search engine in a number of ways.

1. You can guarantee where you show up in the query the searcher makes based on the keywords that you select.
2. You can guarantee top listings in some traditional search engine listings.
3. You only pay when a search actually clicks on your listing and goes to your site.
4. You can determine a budget and how much you want to pay for the number of searchers that are sent to your site.

The major PPC Search engines are Overture (formerly GOTO), 7Search, FindWhat, and Sprinks.

Getting Listed

With so many different places to get listed it makes you wonder where you should start. Obviously, you would like to get listed in every search engine, directory, search portal, and PPC search engine but which one should you do first?

Key Point!
Do Not Use Pay-Per-Click
Search Engines for Your Main
Theme Site!

Move PPC (Pay-Per-Click) to the back of the list. Because you can target the PPC search engines specifically to your keywords a small business is better to use their limited budget to send any clicks directly to their mini-sites. The purpose of the theme information site is to collect e-mail addresses; the mini-site is to earn money. You can set a direct budget for the number of visitors directly sent to your sales page. If you have the budget for a pay-per-click search engine spend it and track the number of sales you are getting. This is the marketers dream since you get a direct measure of your investment. You spend money for a certain number of clicks, you know exactly how many of those visitors bought, and how much you paid for each visitor. Test and redo your pages and the cost for each visitor until you make money. Come back to the PPC search engines after you have submitted to the others.

Because so many of the engines, directories and portals are interconnected, there are some advantages in submitting to each in a set order.

1. Submit to Inktomi. Inktomi feeds Search Portals at AOL, MSN, iWON, HotBot, OVERTURE, plus other smaller engines.
2. Submit to LookSmart. At first glance, you would think LookSmart would be a waste of time. I have never searched on it so why would you want to submit? LookSmart is powerful because of its partner networks. Looksmart advertises that its listings reach more than 80% of the Internet population.
3. Next, go to Yahoo. Yahoo requires that you submit your site to a proper category. If you are not sure which category you should be under, follow the help files in their submission pages. When you find the right category, look at the bottom of the page and use the Suggest a Site link.
4. After Yahoo.com accepts your listing, you can submit your site for free to the Open Directory Project. (www.DMOZ.org) Why wait? Because the real people who volunteer their time to create the Open Directory will probably check Yahoo when you submit your site. To submit to the Open Directory you follow the same steps as Yahoo. Find the right category and then click on the add URL button.
5. Next is the FAST or alltheweb.com engine.
6. Google is arguably the most important place for you to submit your information site. Yahoo uses the Google index as its secondary listing. If it is so important, you would think that it should be the first place to submit. However, Google has some unique features that will allow you to rank higher if you wait until last. Google checks to see how many links you have in and out of your site and the quality of those links. Better links will give you a higher ranking. In addition, Google displays your category and description from the Open Directory Index.

How to Submit

If you are responsible for ensuring that your website is prominently placed in the major search engines, then you will want to familiarize yourself with the many paid inclusion services being offered.

Paid inclusion is not to be confused with pay-per-click search (Overture, Findwhat), which offers sponsored positions in return for a charge each time someone clicks on your website's link. Nor does paid inclusion promise that your website will be at the top of the search engine results. Paid inclusion simply provides an opportunity for a website to be indexed by a search engine on a more frequent basis, typically two to seven days.

If paid inclusion does not promise higher positioning on a search engine, then what are the benefits for the search engine marketer? Well, until the introduction of paid inclusion, it would take a search engine anywhere from four to 10 weeks to refresh its index of websites. The Internet had simply become too vast for the average search engine to visit new sites and add them to the index on a more frequent basis. This slowdown meant that most search engine marketers would have to wait months before seeing if the changes made to a website would impact on their search engine positioning. If the changes were effective, that s great. If they were not, it would mean going back to the drawing board and then suffering another agonizingly long wait for the next update. The entire process would take up to six months, with each passing day resulting in more lost revenue.

Paid inclusion, while still in its infancy, provides a search engine marketer with a comparably rapid reaction by the search engines to the changes made at a website. With refresh rates of anywhere from 48 hours with Inktomi and Lycos to seven days with AltaVista, results can be seen quickly. It is now possible to review your current positioning on a website, make changes to your content and then review your results all in the same week. Adding a new product? Thinking of changing the layout of your homepage? With paid inclusion, you can now make the changes to your website and see the impact on the search engines within a few days. It is this rapid turnaround that makes paid inclusion such an obvious choice for people who want to make changes to their website on a regular basis.

So with all of the benefits that paid inclusion brings, you might think that the cost would be too prohibitive for the average website owner. Well, you will be pleased to know that the cost of paid inclusion is very reasonable considering the benefits. The average cost for ensuring rapid inclusion and fast refresh rates is around $30 per year, per URL. While this can be expensive if you have hundreds of pages on your website (paid inclusion only benefits the page you designate, it does not spider the remainder of your site), it makes sense to at least include your home page, and your Site Map. In addition, most of the search engines that offer paid inclusion also offer multiple page discounts.

Submit:
Inktomi at: www.positiontech.com
LookSmart: www.looksmart.com
Yahoo: www.yahoo.com
Open Directory Project: www.dmoz.org
FAST: www.alltheweb.com
Google: www.google.com

Key Point!
There is A Right Way and Wrong
Way to Submit to Search
Engines!

Whether tweaking your search engine positioning or ensuring that your new products are indexed, paid inclusion becomes a valuable marketing ally. As search engines look for new methods of generating income, you can be sure that others will follow with their own versions of paid inclusion. While many website owners will remain content with the "free submission" and lengthy wait for their site to be indexed, it is clear that if your website is a channel for revenue, you will want to use paid inclusion.

Getting Ready to Submit

 - Do your homework before submitting. Make sure the site is ready. This is especially true for the directories where a real person is going to check your site out before it gets listed.
 - Submit your site by hand. Automatically submitting your website with a piece of software can cause big problems. Submission software can be identified by the search engine. The result is that your site may be banned if it is submitted too often or at least ranked lower than it should.
 - Check the guidelines for each of the engines or directories and follow them.
 - Check and recheck the topic or subtopic if you are submitting to a directory. If you submit the listing right the first time you have a better chance of being placed correctly.