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DO NOT CALL US to
complain you are not in the search engines. Search engines are independent businesses with
their own rules. We do not and can not be responsible for your
search position concerning any keywords. If you have a complaint
about how it works, call the search engines. Calling us to complain would be as senseless as
calling the DMV to complain that it raining too hard to drive
your car.
We can only assist you to make your pages
more search friendly and provide you with our years of search
engine knowledge. The page content is totally up to you, and the
search placement is totally in your own hands and between you and
the mega corps that control the search engines.
If you are serious about maximizing your
search engine placement then read this entire document. Yes it’s
long, but short in comparison to all the info you need to know.
This is an abbreviated explanation of a subject that thousands of
books have been written about. Being a search engine expert
requires more training and education than a Law Degree. Consider
this pages as a guide on how to become a search engine
expert in 15 minutes.
How it Works
Each time a search is done the search engine can not go out and
check every page online for comparisons. So they use Robots
or automated programs also know as spiders to "Crawl"
websites and save the content of its pages in a huge database.
The database is literally the entire internet on one computer.
If your website was "Crawled" or
accessed by the robots 3 months ago, the content in the search
engine database is exactly what was on your page 3 months ago.
This makes the searches slow and cumbersome and it often takes 3-6
months before you see a change in your pages in the search
engines. Even if the search engine crawls your site today, it
could be several weeks before the new content that it retrieved
is updated in its search database. This time is greatly reduced
based on your search ranking. A powerful website could have
content updated daily, where a smaller less active site could
take 6 months or more.
The search engine has limited resources and
spends its time working the more active websites and won’t
spend precious time indexing 5 pages sites that have no valuable
content or relevance to its users. With billions of pages to
index the search engine will choose the pages that have better
content based on their own personal opinions (also know as search
algorithms).
The search engine knows to check your
website as soon as you register your domain. You do not need to
submit the website to the search engine; however you can suggest
the site to each search engine if you think it will help. You may
also want to submit your site to industry specific searches that
do not use the whois database. For example if you make aircraft
parts you may want to find searches that only deal with aircraft
and aviation. In those instances you will need to submit your
site to that search.
Search engines try to sort through billions
of pages to bring relevant results on searches to the users. That
means that every time you do a search it has to check the data on
over 4 billion pages. The trick is to be number one of those 4
billion pages.
To accomplish this task the search engines
use over 100 parameters to rank your website among the 4 billion
others. The actual formulas and parameters are kept secret and
change as much as the weather. This is done to prevent exactly
what you want to accomplish, getting that top listing.
If it was easy, the only sites that would
come up would be the companies that spend millions of dollars
building their websites and would know the best formula for
getting placed highest. Your website would never have a chance to
be placed in the results.
But that is not the case, so even
experienced teams of high paid webmasters and statisticians are
kept confused. So you do not have to feel like you are at a
disadvantage, its intentionally confusing to make the playing
field more equal for the small website with relevant content. But
this means no one will ever understand exactly how the search
engine works.
However, there are known parameters that
will contribute to a higher ranking and move your results closer
to the top. This is not public information, it is data compiled
by BumbleBee Works through years of development and observation
that we are sharing with our customers. Everyone has their own
ideas about what works, so every article you read will likely be
telling you something different. If you read enough of them, one
will tell you want you want to hear, or you can believe what you
read here. We are not selling you any search services, so we do
not benefit from our explanations. Many sites explain how the
searches work and then try to sell you a service to get you
traffic. In our opinion that is a major conflict of interest and
is nothing more than a commercial advertisement.
Top
10 Features that contribute to Search Placement
- Content - the actual
text in all the pages of your website.
- External Links -
linking to sites outside your own that have similar or
relevant content.
- Update Frequency -
how often your pages change.
- Outside Links - the
number of sites that link back to you.
- Page Title - the
title of the page.
- Number of Pages - the
number of pages on your website.
- Page Length - the
amount of information is on your page.
- Content Relevancy -
how content on each page relates to the overall website.
- Total Page Size - the
average page size in Kilobytes
- Age - the time the
domain been registered and active online.
There are at least 100 other
parameters that are weighed and calculated by the search engine.
But in the interest of keeping this lesson brief I will
concentrate on only those top 10 keys to search engine placement.
To help explain this, we will use a sample
product the "Squiggle Bot". It will be a plastic 12
inch tall pose able action figure made out of the cool stuff
Stretch Armstrong was made of. Our website will be http://squigglebot.com hosted on the bumblebee works system.
When finished we will search the web "Squiggle
Bot" and see what our placement is in the search engines.
1) Content
Content is the number one factor in establishing your place in
the search engine. The content is defined as the actual TEXT in
your pages. That means the words that are actually typed into the
pages. That does not include pictures or text on images.
The names on your menu bar or title space
are images, so they can not be read by the search engine. If you
have a picture of The Squiggle Bot on your page, the search
engine will not know it from any other picture. It won’t be
able to tell if the pic is of the Squiggle Bot or a Barbie Doll.
To make sure the search engine will find your page when they are
searching for "Squiggle Bot" you will need to include
the words "Squiggle Bot" in the page.
So let’s add the sentence "This
Squiggle Bot is $19.95." to our page. Now we have the key
words in the page that we are looking to maximize. Now anyone can
find us? Wrong! Keep reading!
2) External Links
Linking to other sites is critical to establishing content. The
search engine compares your site to the sites you link to from
your pages. So we will want to link to quality websites that
offer similar products. Since our "Squiggle Bot" is a
fictitious product we will link to other sites that offer pose
able action figures.
On our links page we will include:
This is only a small sample of content
relevant links. Don't stop at 4 links, having 50+ is better.
Having over 100 on the page will begin to detract from the
ranking.
If you link to a large number of websites
that have content related to another field, such as used cars,
the search engine will think your site is about used cars. Since
you will not have any content about used cars on your website you
will not rank very high in a search. So try to keep the sites
relevant to your products or services.
3) Update Frequency
This is in our opinion the third most important factor in
placement and updates. If your pages are not updated often the
search engine will not come back to check it. If your site is
updated daily, the search will come back each day to check for
changes.
This is extremely important when you make
changes or add new products and want them listed. Normally it
takes 3 months for a website to be updated in the search. If you
make a change, it will be at least 3 months before the change is
relevant to the search or a new product page is added.
Updating your page daily is not the only
factor in having the site crawled by the bots but it’s a big
one. A static site could be showing pages as old as 1 year even
though it has been recently updated. If it was not updated in the
past, the search engine will stop checking for updates.
The best feature about bumblebeeworks is
that the pages are dynamically generated. This means they are
assembled by our software when the search engine robot accesses
the page. They see this as just being updated when they got there
and will come back as soon as possible to look for new updates.
One of our main sites http://buzztrader.com is so active it is crawled several times an hour
and the search cache is never more than a 24 hours old. This is
how the news websites such as http://CNN.com can get
the info out fast. But your website won’t be as active as
cnn.com and will not be checked as frequently.
On average, bumblebee hosted website are
crawled by google every 1 to 2 weeks, greatly improving your
chances of having your content updated quickly. However we do see
sites that have been set up and unused for several months. Those
sites tend to get back ordered and once they get started the
search engine may have set them on a 3 or 6 month rotation.
All of the other subjects we cover also
affect that search rotation, so having a more relevant site in
all areas is also necessary to get that daily crawl. Every factor
has an impact on the other factors. If you are serious about
search placement you will have to consider all factors when
making any changes or updates to your website.
4) Outside Links
It is important that other sites link back to you. Since search
engines are for the most part overwhelmed and not perfect they
will not be able to count every website with a link to yours. So
you want as many links back to you as possible.
Power sites like ebay.com have millions of
links back to them and have total power in that realm, but you
still need links back to yourself to get noticed and to pump up
that search ranking.
You should trade links with other websites,
add your site to webrings and FFA (Free For All) Links pages and
posting boards. This will help establish and build your outside
links value. Keep in mind, linking from sites that are not
relevant to your product could hurt you as much as linking to
irrelevant sites. So stick with boards with topics relevant to
your product or service.
5) Page Title
It is crucial to have a page title that reflects your content. It
is always tempting to have the page title as your business name,
but people are going to search for "Squiggle Bots" and
not our company "The Cyber web Inc".
Page titles over 50 characters will count
against you. Keep is short, simple and accurate.
For our page we will have "Squiggle
Bot Pose able Action Figure, Squiggle Bots" as the title. We
have repeated "Squiggle Bot" with the plural version
"Squiggle Bots" to cover both. If someone is searching
for Squiggle Bot the page will not necessarily come up if it says
only "Squiggle Bots".
6) Number of Pages
The number of pages in your website is the most overlooked
feature in placement. People continuously build 5 pages and wait
for traffic. If your website is under 50 pages the search engine
sees it as an ant climbing a mountain. It will not see you as
being important since the content is limited and most of your
pages are trying to sell something.
Think of it as you looking to buy household
items. You can drive 5 minutes from your home and go to 7-11 or
wal-mart. You would choose wal-mart because they have more
choices and you know you will get what you want.
The search engine uses the same thought
process, when someone is searching for household items, they tend
to ignore the 7-11's and the 5 page websites and send people to
the wal-marts because they know it has what the person is looking
for. So having more is always better.
Populating your shopping cart with hundreds
of items is going to greatly improve your chance of being found.
Keep in mind, every page will be indexed, so having 100 pages
rather than 5 is better. It is similar to buying 100 lottery
tickets with 4 billion possible combinations. Not great odds, but
better.
But having 1000 pages that relate to your
content will help you get a strong search ranking and contribute
to the overall results you desire.
7) Page Length
Having 1000 pages is good, but you need to have strong
content on those pages.
Previously we put "This Squiggle Bot
is $19.95." in our page. This is poor content. The text is
shorter than the title of the page, its over shadowed by the
images on the page and shows a week page and will likely not be
included in the index.
The descriptions should be long and
complete. Remember, every word in the page is searchable. So let’s
include lots of keywords in the page. Our keywords are "Squiggle
Bot", so our new description will be:
The awesome Squiggle Bot pose able
action figure is now available in 5 colors. The yellow squiggle
bot is a banana color. The blue Squiggle Bot is a dark navy color.
The action figure is also available in red, green and white. New
pose able joints allow quick posing of the plastic action figure.
The squigglebot is sure to become a collectible just like the
Barbie doll.
Notice how we have repeated the words
"Squiggle Bot" though the description. Having the words
repeat too much will hurt you, but having it sparsely scattered
through the page will help.
Pages under 500 words tend to be viewed by
searches as not very important and not even indexed. So to be
effective our text will have to be 3 or 4 times what we have
shown as our sample.
Make sure you have LONG Accurate
descriptions and text or your site will not even be included. The
search engine robot will check your site, see it as undeveloped
and schedule it to be indexed next month assuming you are still
adding more content. After a few of these rotations, if the site
is not added to, the time between crawls will get longer and
longer, eventually not checking back at all.
8) Content Relevancy
The search engine will count the number of times the keywords
appear on each page of your website, and then calculate how many
words overall are on the website. Eventually generating a number
used to rank the relevance of keywords in your overall website.
It will also look for relevance matches.
For example if you sell candles you should have words such as
wax, wick, holders, flame and so on contained in the pages. The
search engine is using a database derived from a thesaurus and
comparing words to find out what the site is about overall. This
allows the search engine to determine if you are making candles,
selling candles or using candles for decorating. Anyone searching
for either of those subjects does not want results for the others.
We advise using a thesaurus to get keywords
and use them in your pages to make it clear to the search engine
exactly what your site offers.
For example a website that is telling the
history of squiggle bots will rank higher than a website that
just has one squiggle bot for sale. By having words relevant to
squiggle bots.
So to insure that we have "Squiggle
Bot" relevant content we will add a history page to our
website and make up some stories about the evolution of the
squiggle bot and so on.
9) Total Page Size
For some reason the search engines seem to ignore big pages.
That is pages that are over 500K in size.
It makes sense since most people are on
slow dial up connections and won’t wait 10 minutes for a
page to load. The robot crawling your website will not wait long.
If it takes too long, they move on to the next website.
So it is important to keep the content (page
pictures and art) at a minimum. Our system will automatically
impose limits on page sizes and will resize pics for maximum
efficiency. So you really don't need to be concerned about this.
But understand that there are specific reasons for all the
systems and part of our goal is to keep your pages search and
user friendly.
So with our sample website we won’t
have to be concerned with this parameter.
10) Age
The age of your website is also an important feature. New
websites are not seen as being highly relevant. Having a website
more than 1 year seems to be the magic number. Since most sites
are registered for 1 year and non successful sites go unpaid and
cancel. But sites that have some value or have some success go
beyond that one year range and search rankings seem to improve
for those websites beyond that 1 year mark. So keeping the site
open and active for 1 full year will also be important to build
your search ranking.
Most new websites are not even indexed for
3 months. That is because when you register a domain, it takes
time to build the website. At some point they decided 3 months
was a good time to see if the site had any value. If your site is
not open when the search engine comes to crawl it you could be
waiting another 6 months before it will check again.
You can not control the age of your
website, but keeping it open for as long as possible will
contribute to the search ranking. If the site is taken offline
the search rank will decrease. You will often see ads for "Domain
Parking", this is one method of keeping you site alive
online. However, it does more for the company parking it than you.
We do not recommend parking your domain, unless you get it free
or get paid for traffic it generates for the parking lot.
Search engines are also concerned with
their results. If you are on a 3 month crawl and the site closes,
the search engine does not want to send people to a page that is
not there. So they tend to stick with older established sites to
insure their results are high quality.
Search Results Comparison for our
Sample Website
Let us now take a look at the search engines and see how our
sample website places.
[ Click to Search Google
]
NOTICE: Since we
just opened the website September of 2004 and we know that it
will take up to 3 months to be indexed you won’t be able to
view our example until early 2005. The info we provided is good,
but the nature of the internet is slow and internet businesses
are built on patience.
Special Notes:
Remember, search engines are their own
business and you have no voice with them. The do things that help
them make money. They are not there to serve you, nor do they
have to list your website. You are at their mercy and have to
play by their rules. There is no guarantee you will ever get one
hit from a search engine. But if you follow our tips you can see
some traffic in time.
But first do the math. 250 million searches
daily. 150 million of those are for "Brittney Spears, Paris
Hilton or some other Sex or Porn website content". That
leaves 100 million searches to be divided between 4 billion pages.
If everyone gets a fair share and that is truly the goal of the
search engine that would be one page hit every 40 days.
That is certainly not enough traffic to
build a business. By tweaking your pages you can increase that
number and take traffic away from other pages. But even good
pages will not get huge volumes of traffic without outside
advertising.
Websites such as CNN.com and Wal-Mart.com
get traffic from existing customers and their extensive
advertising campaigns. The amount of search traffic they get is
negligible, but they are successful businesses in spite of the
lack of search placement. They opt to keep the sites more
commercial than concentrating on their placement and search
ranking.
Other sites such as amazon.com were built
on search engine traffic; however the competition for traffic was
much lower 6 years ago. You could build page, submit the page and
see traffic in 2-3 days. But those days are over and if you
missed the early days of internet traffic, there is no going back.
Companies got big fast, but those big opportunities are not
available today.
Search Placement VS Usability:
In summary, if you have about 2 years to
learn how to build a maximized website you could probably place
well for several key search words. Or if you want to spend $20,000.00-$40,00.00
to have your site maximized for 2 or 3 key words, you also have
that option. We do not recommend either.
The problem with search engine maximization
is that no one knows for sure what will work and it takes months
to find out if pages do work and how they will be placed. Then
the search algorithms could change any day and you could be at
the bottom again and starting all over with new pages.
The worst part is that a page that is good
for a search is not necessarily a page that would be a good page
for selling your product. To maximize a page you will have to
sacrifice content and often say things not relevant to a product.
You are also limited in what you can say about your product. You
may also have to redirect customers to other retailers to get
link relevance, giving away your customers free to your
competitors.
So which do you value more? A few hits a
day from a search engine? Or an effective website and sales tool?
Today, you can buy search traffic for as
little as $0.05 per click. So for a few dollars a month you can
get more traffic than you would by spending $40,000.00 having
your site maximized.
There are 2 main programs for buying
traffic http://google.com/adwords/ and http://overture.com ,
both is good programs but google is better. The results could be
displayed on hundreds of thousands of content sites or the search
results pages. But you can control, where, how and how much.
What Not To Do
Do Not - Use Meta Tags. Meta Tags were
something that has gone the way of the Model-T. They are tags
placed in the page to tell the search engine what the page is
about. However, you can put anything in the tag. So adding "Brittney
Spears & Paris Hilton" (the #1 search terms for the last
year) should allow you to get placed in those searches. But the
tags do not have to be relevant to the page, and with all the
cheaters out there the tags were eliminated by all the searches.
Having Meta tags that the search does not see as relevant to your
site will get your site excluded from the search engine.
Do not repeat keywords over and over again
in the page. This technique is seen as spamming and will cause
your website to be excluded from the search engine.
Another popular Spam technique is to have
keywords in the page the same color as the background so they are
invisible to the viewer but read by the search. This will also
get your site excluded from the search engine.
Do not use automated submitting services or
software. The search engine will see that as an automated attempt
to Spam the search and will often exclude your website or put it
on a long term crawl often exceeding 6 months.
Do not submit more than 1 page to the
search engine. You only need to submit the main domain. The
search engine will crawl the entire website to get all the pages.
If you submit multiple pages you could be risking exclusion from
the search engine. They see it as an attempt to trick them into
listing pages as unique websites.
It’s very easy to be excluded and very
hard to be included, so keep the site honest, avoid the tips and
trick you read about online. Just because you have read it, does
not mean it’s true and could have been posted to
intentionally get you banned to cut competition.
To make matters worse, google.com provides
80% of the search results online. They provide services for AOL,
MSN, AltaVista and several others. If you are excluded by google,
you are for the most part finished and will have to build a new
website if you want search engine traffic.
Common Misconceptions
People should be able to find your website
through the search engines. That is not always true.
Search engines only display 200-400 results
out of millions. Your website could be from 401 to 1 millionth.
Granted, 401 is great out of 1 million results, but not good
enough.
Everyone expects the search engine to bring
huge amounts of traffic and make them rich. Everyone wants to
hear that they will get this magical search traffic. But the
truth is, you won’t. You missed that opportunity by several
years and we have to work hard to make it in today’s
internet. The number of sites competing with you is too big to
print, each site competing the same traffic. To get traffic on
today’s internet you have to be a serious player with a
powerful and massive website.
Evaluating A Simple Search
Let’s evaluate a simple search to see
how a website can be found. We want to buy a "Bird House
made by Fred Smith". That is pretty specific and should be
easy to find, right? Not necessarily.
We search google for "Bird Houses"
and get over 3 million results. None of the 400 shown are for
Fred Smith. The results range from homes built on bird street to
sites about birds and a few sites that sell bird houses.
So we narrow the search to "Bird
Houses by Fred Smith", you are already thinking that no one
will know to search for Fred Smith. And your right, but to make
it worse, the search yields 120,000 results.
How can this happen unless there are 120,000
Fred Smiths selling bird houses? And why isn't Fred’s
website #1.
The search is looking for websites that
have all the words in your search Bird Houses By Fred
Smith.
The results include many sites such as the
following:
Books about Birds
and Birdwatching
... Big Book of Bird Houses
& Bird Feeders by
Thom ... of the Mid-Atlantic (Smithsonian
Handbooks) by Fred J. Alsop
III; ... Therapy and Training for Your Pet Bird
by Larry
The keywords that were searched for are in
bold. You can see this text clearly matches all the words we
searched for but this website is more relevant in the world of
bird houses than Fred’s backyard workshop. And there are
more than 400 others that are also more relevant. This makes
finding Fred’s website almost impossible unless we search
for something more specific such as his phone number or actual
URL.
It does not appear that we will find the
site we want even though we are very specific.
Just think of it like this. Take one page
and put your name on it. Then stack in a pile of 4 billion pages,
a stack that will reach beyond the moon. Now what is the chance
of finding your page in that stack?
I have been told by customers that if they
list their business in the phone book they will get calls when
someone looks up their type of service. That is true, but imagine
a phone book that is 500 miles long and the section for your
business is 1 mile long. The odds of the person reading that book
and finding your phone number are slim.
You have to remember that the internet is
made up of every business in the world. When you build a
bookstore on a city block, people will walk by and stop in, but
online they have millions of doors to choose from, why choose
yours? Just as in the storefront scenario you can dress up the
window, put up sale signs and so on. The internet is no different.
Use good business sense, advertise and build your business, don't
look for the business to build itself.
If someone has specific enough info they
can find your website, but you can't expect the flood gates to
open when you open the website. It takes time, patience and lots
of luck. Follow the tips we have given you and you will improve
the traffic you get. But if you are counting on search traffic,
you could grow old waiting.
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