Getting Good Placement in Search Engines

Tips on improving search engine results.

(Shel Horowitz's Frugal Marketing Tip, January, 1998)

[Editor's Note: A lot has changed in the search engine world since this article was written. For a more up-to-date look, please click here.]

On the Internet, search engine listings are kind of like the Yellow Pages—except that most users are unlikely to see more than the first two or three screens of returns. So if a search engine turns you up as number 384 out of 5,000 hits, it isn't going to do you much good.

Lots of services will offer good placement for a fee—but many of these meet their guarantees by getting you listed high if you type in some very arcane phrase. You want to be listed high in a common, ordinary search.

What can you do? There are many steps you can take. Here are a few of the most important ones:

1. Use tags and page titles to indicate key words and phrases in the page's content; several of the search engines, including Alta Vista, index these tags and will list you much higher when your meta tags match a search request.

2. Avoid repeating the same word more than twice in a meta tag or in the first couple of paragraphs of content—otherwise, you might be bumped off for "spamming" the search engine. (if you have related concepts, such as press release and news release, try using hyphens to indicate a phrase, i.e., press-release, news-release—though in all honesty, I'm not sure how the search engines treat this).

3. Encourage people to search for strings of words, rather than individual words (i.e., "press release" instead of "press" or "release"; this will avoid irrelevant returns about wine presses and catch-and-release fishing, for instance)

4. Visit http://www.searchenginewatch.com — a gold mine of information on search engine strategies.

5. Register individually at the most important engines and directories. Yahoo and Alta Vista alone could account for 3/4 of your hits, so pay particular attention to these. But also list individually at Excite, Lycos, Webcrawler, Northern Light, and any others that you identify as key for your niche. Automated bulk submissions can be used for less important ones. TIP: before you start registering, prepare a document with 10-, 25-, 50-, and 100-word descriptions of your site, along with a list of all the URLs on your site. TEST all the URLs for accuracy! Then use this document to copy and paste information into the search engine forms.

6. If you have several different content areas of your site, * register the main pages for each section individually! * So in other words, at my own site, I register not only my home page, but also the home pages for my various magazines and the resource pages for frugality and marketing.

7. Check your placement after your registrations are processed. Visit http://www.rankthis.com and enter your URL along with various search strings.

Thank you reading this back issue of Shel Horowitz's Monthly Frugal Marketing Tips, published every month since May, 1997; please click here to view the complete archives, grouped by subject. Shel is an internationally known copywriter and marketing consultant, author of Grassroots Marketing Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and several other books, and creator of the Frugal Marketing web site. Please click here to contact Shel.


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