Website Promotion
Free website promotion tutorial
Welcome to A Promotion Guide. If this is your first visit, you might want to take the time to read through this page. It contains a free step-by-step website promotion tutorial that also serves as a "User's Guide" to the site. Reading it will give you a good idea on what you need to do, when you need to do it and how the articles on this site will help you.
This tutorial is split into three phases that each have two, three or four steps. It is highly recommended that you start from the first phase and move forwards only after you have completed all of the steps in it.
We'll begin with the assumption that your site is brand new and that you haven't done any website promotion work yet. However, that doesn't mean that you can't use the tutorial if you have submitted to a few search engines or registered your site with a couple of directories. If you notice that there are some things you have already done, feel free to simply skip over them.
Promoting your site takes a lot of time and may involve waiting several weeks or even months to get into certain directories and search engines. Thus, it might be wise to bookmark this page so that you can return to it later and continue the tutorial from where you left off.
Website promotion, phase one - Directories
You should start your website promotion efforts by listing your site at the most popular Internet directories. Because they can send you substantial amounts of traffic and affect your ranking in various search engines, it is wise to make sure that your site is present in all of the major directories before doing anything else.
Step one - General information
Submitting to directories is easy and doesn't require much effort. It's ensuring that your submission will be accepted that makes this task a hard one.
First, read "Boost your traffic with website directories" to get a basic idea on what directories are and how to submit to them.
Examine the article about web page design to get some tips on how to improve your site and reduce the chances of it being rejected.
Step two - The Open Directory Project
Start with the Open Directory Project. While your site has to offer good, unique content to be accepted to the ODP, its editors usually review sites quickly and won't reject them without a good reason for doing so. This, along with the fact that submitting to the ODP is free of charge, makes it a perfect starting point. Completing this step successfully will also provide you with experience that will prove to be very valuable later on.
Read my thoughts on how Google's ranking algorithm works and notice how an ODP listing seems to affect your ranking at Google. Keep this information in mind when you submit.
Take a look at the advice on submitting your website to the ODP.
Finally, submit your site to the ODP.
Step three - Yahoo
After securing a listing at ODP, your next task is to get the folks at Yahoo to notice that your site exists and is worth a place in their directory. This might cost you a fair amount of money if you are running a commercial site, but is usually worth it. Non-commercial sites can get in for free, but might require several submissions and a lot of patience before they are accepted.
Check out the Yahoo-specific guidelines and hints and the article about how Yahoo's search feature ranks sites.
Bite the bullet and submit your site to Yahoo.
Step four - Looksmart
You're done with ODP and Yahoo, so it is time to move on. Looksmart is the third of the big website directories and is also the final target of our submission campaign. A good listing in it can send a lot of visitors your way, but obtaining one sometimes requires you to open your wallet a bit.
Read "Looksmart, the pay per click directory". The article explains why Looksmart is important and how to submit to the directory. It also has the details on what the "secret" back door to Looksmart is and how to use it.
Try to submit for free, if possible. If not, evaluate whether a Looksmart listing would be worth its price and submit if you see it as a wise move.
Website promotion, phase two - Search engines
Now that your site has been included in ODP, Yahoo and Looksmart, you should already be receiving clearly more traffic than before. The next task is to get to know search engines and use them to bring even more people to your pages. Because you have completed phase one, you have established a good foundation for making your site perform well in the search engines.
Step one - Search engine optimization, basics
Before you even submit to search engines, learn the basics of their algorithms (ranking systems) and adjust your pages to meet their criteria as well as possible. This will take some time and effort, but doing some work now will save you from a lot of trouble in the future.
First, try to make the design of your site as search engine friendly as possible. To read more about the subject, take a look at my article about website optimization.
Next, you'll need to do some keyword optimization. Sounds frightening, but in plain English it simply means choosing the correct keywords for your pages. Using the wrong words is perhaps the most common reason why people don't get satisfying results from their search engine optimization work.
Continue by reading these search engine optimization tips.
Read the article about META tags and add them to all of your pages. The META keywords tag isn't absolutely necessary, but the META description tag is very important.
Learn what link popularity is and how search engines use it to rank your pages.
Unless you have already done so, read about Google's algorithm. Google is among the most popular search services of today, so it is wise to take its requirements into account.
Use all of this information to optimize your pages for the search engines.
Step two - Search engine optimization, advanced
Your site is now adequately prepared to be submitted into search engines. But if you want to widen your knowledge about them and increase your chances of success, you still have some work to do. On the other hand, if you're totally exhausted and just want to get this thing over with, you'll be delighted to know that this step isn't absolutely necessary.
Study some of the more advanced things related to search engine optimization. Among them are cloaking, css tricks, doorway pages, themes and how to improve your search engine ranking with click popularity.
Read about the things you should avoid doing from this article that outlines common web site promotion mistakes.
Step three - Submitting to search engines
Finally, the time has come to start the process of submitting to search engines. Before you begin, you will need to know where to submit, how to submit and what to submit. Registering your pages with all the major search engines is going to take some time, but these days you simply can't sit around and wait for them to find your site on their own.
Learn the correct search engine submission techniques. Incorrectly submitted pages may be left out of the database.
Read the "Top search engines" article to see which engines are the most popular ones.
Submit to them, then move on. Check back next month or so to see whether your pages have been included or not.
If you are running a commercial site, you might also want to consider paying for search engine placement. Take a look at how you can use PPC search engine advertising to buy your way to the top.
Website promotion, phase three - More techniques
After being accepted into the largest directories and having pages of your site come up in answer to searches done at the major search engines, the long hours that you've spent on website promotion have begun to pay off and your daily visitor count is starting to look good. But there is still plenty you can do to help your site attract even more traffic.
In phase three, we'll examine different promotion methods that you might want to try. However, in order to prevent you from wasting your time on things that don't work, we'll also go over a few techniques that have proven to be less than spectacular when I experimented with them.
Step one - Keep these in mind
First, let's take a look at the good stuff. The articles introduced in this step are about the website promotion methods that are at least partially effective. Some of them work better than others, but if used correctly, all of them can produce results that will be worth your while. Of course, most of the articles include advice on what you need to do to obtain the best possible results with the method discussed.
If you sell something on your site, you might want to try banner ads. Usually banner campaigns are seen as expensive and ineffective, but it is partially because advertisers don't know how to design good banners.
Read the article on how to increase traffic with return visitors. Getting people to come back is the secret to why some sites get amazingly many hits per day.
Learn what reciprocal links are and how to get them, then put that knowledge into use. In addition to sending you visitors, reciprocal links will also increase your link popularity and help your site rank higher in the search engines.
Start using E-mail signatures. They might not produce thousands of visitors, but are a great way to promote your site a bit without having to actually do anything.
Evaluate whether your site could benefit from joining a topsite list. These lists have their good and bad sides, but might be at least worth a try.
Consider trying to build traffic with Usenet advertising. It can give you a nice traffic boost and help spread the word about your site, but only if done properly. Read the article to learn why Usenet promotion should only be done with great care.
Writing newsletter articles often works well and can send you large amounts of targeted traffic in a short period of time, for free.
Step two - Forget these
As said, everything just doesn't always work the way it should in the world of promotion. In step two, our attention is focused on website promotion methods that are more trouble than they are worth. They might not be entirely useless, but your time would be better spent on improving your site or spreading the word about your site in other ways.
Click exchange programs are easy, fast, free and will get you a lot of visitors. That's why it might be a surprise to hear that they really aren't good website promotion tools.
A lot has been written about FFA pages and for the past few years, most of it has been negative. The only thing they are good for is increasing the flow of spam to your E-mail address.
Winning website awards can occasionally be useful, especially if the awards are well-known. However, sometimes the winner of the award is not the real winner.
Final words
Congratulate yourself for being persistent, bright and hard-working. Most get frustrated and quit before this point, which is why most sites never become anything. After all, the secret to having a successful site is working hard in both promoting and creating it. You just might have what it takes.
After going through those three phases, you've read just about everything this site has to offer. While there is more to website promotion than what we have discussed here, you now know quite a lot about the subject. If you still desire more information, don't forget to come back to this site every now and then. This tutorial is always incomplete, because I continuously notice things that I want to write about.
I hope that A Promotion Guide has been able to help you to make your site more popular and thus given you the chance to spread your ideas and thoughts to a larger audience. And remember, if you have achieved good results, it's not because I showed you how to do it - it's because you did it.
Boost your traffic with website directories
Directories are places where users go to find websites, just like they do with search engines. However, there are significant differences between the two. For people who are trying to boost the traffic to their sites, it is vital to understand these differences in order to succeed.
While search engines normally accept almost any site or page that is submitted to them without looking at its quality, directories usually only accept sites that offer quality information. Because all sites submitted to directories are reviewed by humans, sites that are of low quality rarely get accepted.
This leads us to a logical conclusion: Before submitting your site to any directories, make sure that your site is completely ready for it! I strongly recommend that you read the "Web page design" section of this site for more information on how to prepare your site for the submission. Remember that directories list sites, not pages. In normal circumstances, you should only submit the front page of your site to directories.
Which directories can really boost your traffic?
If you did what I suggested above, your site should now be ready to be submitted to different directories. But how does this happen? Well, first you'll of course have to pick the directories you're going to submit to. The most important ones your site should get into are Yahoo, Looksmart and DMOZ, also known as Open Directory. You can, and should, read more about their individual features from their own sections on this site.
What about the other directories? Well, there are a few other interesting ones you might want to submit to, but they are far less important than the "big three" above. Do submit to them if possible, but focus on Yahoo, Looksmart and DMOZ, since they provide way more traffic.
OK, now you know where you should submit to. But how do you actually submit? It is relatively simple. Nearly all directories consist of different categories and subcategories, each consisting of sites related to the name of the category. You'll just need to find the category (or more often, subcategory) that best fits the topic of your site.
This can be done by either browsing through the directory or by doing a search on the keyword that best describes your site - often the directory will return a few categories that are relevant to your site and you'll just need to choose the one that seems to be most accurate. Usually, it is best to submit to the most detailed category that applies to your site; if your site is about programming in C++, you should submit to >Computers>Programming>C++ instead of >Computers>Programming>.
It is wise to spend some time to search the most accurate category for your site, since submissions done to the wrong categories are usually just thrown out. In addition, the category you submit to will be the category you're going to be stuck with for the rest of your site's life, and getting stuck in the wrong category might cost you some heavy traffic.
The submission process
After you've found the right category for your site, it is time to move on to the actual submitting process. This is an even more delicate part than the last one, so keep on your toes. The first thing to do is to carefully read the directory's rules and instructions on how to submit. They are usually displayed when you are beginning the submission process. Read them over a couple of times and follow them to the letter.
Nearly all directories will ask you to give the title of your site and a description of it when you are submitting. Put some thought in creating these, because they can significantly boost or reduce the amount of traffic you'll get from the directory. When writing your description, don't stuff it with words like 'best' or 'cheapest', and don't use ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. Write a short (15-25 words) description that accurately describes your site, and try to make it sound like an impartial review.
It would be also a good idea to check how the descriptions of the other sites in the same category are written and use them as a model. If possible, make sure that one or two of your best keywords are included in the description, but don't just stuff them there. Your description should sound like it's a natural sentence. If the editor thinks your description is little more than a list of keywords, he'll reject it and write a new one that may not include even a single keyword. Having one or two of your most important keywords in your description often helps your site to be found when a user searches the directory instead of browsing it.
If you later decide that the description you entered the first time isn't good enough, it is possible to contact most directories and try to get your description changed to a better one. Unfortunately, it is usually very difficult and very time-consuming to get directories to change the description of your site at a later date. Thus, it is heavily recommended that you try and get it right the first time.
Your title should be brief, it is not a place to list all your products and services. If possible, the title should include your most important keyword in it and start with a letter that is near the beginning of the alphabet. 'Automobile World' is better than 'World of Automobiles', because many directories list sites in alphabetical order and getting listed near the top can boost your traffic from the directory.
Since the title MUST be the official title of the site and it must be used on your pages, this might require you to change the name of your site. In addition to this, the title must sound like it just happens to start with a letter near the beginning of the alphabet, or it will get edited. The actual title of this site is 'A Promotion Guide', but Yahoo listed me as 'Promotion Guide, A', since the Yahoo editor thought the 'A' was included just to get to the top of the list. The same rules that apply to the description apply to the title - no promotional hype, no all capital letters.
After you have entered all the information, remember to check it for any possible typos or errors in spelling. Be extra careful with your URL, since a typo in it would naturally result in your site never getting reviewed. Then, say a quick prayer (in the case of Yahoo, at least two prayers) and hit the submit button. Good luck!
You'll usually get an E-mail if your site is accepted, but rarely if it is rejected. It is thus sometimes hard to know whether your site has been reviewed and rejected or if it is still unreviewed. If you don't get an E-mail after a few days and your site has not appeared to the directory, don't panic. Wait a few weeks until resubmitting your site; many directories are flooded with submissions and will get annoyed if you don't give them enough time to process the submission.
Looksmart, the pay per click directory
Founded in 1995, Looksmart has since then become one of the three largest website directories, the two others being ODP and Yahoo. While the Looksmart site does not draw as many visitors as Yahoo, nor does its data have as many users as ODP's, the directory has several powerful partners that make being listed in it seem attractive. To mention a few of them, MSN, Mamma, Altavista and Dogpile all use Looksmart's data somewhere on their pages or search results. Also, it appears that at least Altavista gives a ranking boost to sites that are present in Looksmart's database.
Most webmasters can appreciate Looksmart's partnerships with Mamma, AV and Dogpile, but the reason why they are really drawn to submit to the directory is MSN. Microsoft's portal displays sites that are listed at Looksmart fairly prominently in its search results. Because the MSN site is very popular and because it is the default search engine of Internet Explorer, being well-ranked in it for the right keywords can produce significant amounts of traffic.
Pay per click vs. a free lunch?
In April 2002, Looksmart drastically changed its submission process. It abandoned the previous program, under which a site could pay $299/$149 to get reviewed and if found satisfactory, would be added to the directory. In its place, Looksmart introduced a new scheme named LookListings Small Business.
The new model is based on the pay per click concept and the prices have been adjusted accordingly. The submission fee has been dropped to $49. This only purchases you a review and a promise that if your site meets the Looksmart Listing Guidelines, you'll be accepted into the directory.
Should your site be rejected, you will not get a refund. Also, unlike the Overture $50 setup fee, this $49 will not buy you any click-throughs. In short, it gets you in the door, but that is all.
After your submission is approved, you'll need to make a minimum initial deposit of $150. This fee is refundable and also fully applicable to clicks. The clicks have a flat price of 15 cents, so you won't be able to bid any more or less than that amount per click. Sites receiving less than 100 clicks/month will be charged the minimum monthly spend of $15.
In Overture's pay per click search engine, the ranking of sites is determined by who pays the highest price. Since all clicks cost $0.15 at Looksmart, it naturally can't rank sites in the same way. Instead, it uses a ranking algorithm that is apparently based on the description, title, category and keywords you submit when creating your account. As in regular search engines and directories, there is no guarantee that you'll rank anywhere near the top for the keywords you are targeting.
Purely commercial sites that sell merchandise or services but have very little unique content must choose between two options. Either they participate in the pay per click program, or they aren't included at all. Later we'll discuss which of these two choices would be the better one, but for now, let's forget that issue. Instead, let's tackle another difficult question first.
There are many sites out there that provide excellent, valuable content to Internet surfers. Some of them might have a banner ad or two so that the webmaster doesn't have to worry about how to be able to pay the hosting fees, while others are completely ad free. What about these sites? Are their owners expected to simply pay $0.15 per click, even while they can hardly afford to?
Thank God, the answer is no. There is a back door you can use and if you're lucky, you'll get in for free and be listed in the directory exactly the same way as those paying for the traffic are. It is not a secret, but for obvious reasons, Looksmart does not want to promote the possibility too much. The service is called...
Zeal
Looksmart acquired Zeal in October 2000 and integrated it into the Looksmart directory in August of 2001. The reason why Looksmart bought Zeal was that because of its high fees, most sites that submit to Looksmart are very commercial and focused on selling products instead of providing information. Zeal ensures that the Looksmart directory remains a source for useful information instead of turning into the yellow pages of the Internet.
Interestingly enough, Zeal is quite similar to the non-commercial Open Directory Project. Both use volunteers to review submitted sites and neither of the two charges a fee for submissions made to them. However, there are a few obvious differences which we shall now investigate.
First, Zeal does not allow purely commercial sites to be submitted into it. Zeal's definition of what is commercial and what is not is somewhat vague, so rather than explaining it to you in my own words, here's what their own guidelines have to say about the subject. In a nutshell, "If the primary purpose of a site is to generate revenue or promote the sale of goods or services online or offline, then it is considered commercial (and thus can't be submitted to Zeal)".
The reason behind this rule is that if commercial sites were allowed to submit for free via Zeal, after a while nobody would be interested in Looksmart's pay per click program. Thus, if your site is 100% commercial, you can forget about entering Looksmart via Zeal.
The second difference is that while ODP accepts a wide variety of sites, Zeal (and Looksmart) refuse sites that contain adult material. Persons running such sites should submit their sites to ODP and perhaps Yahoo instead of wasting their time with Looksmart.
Submitting to Zeal
Provided that your site is in compliance with Zeal's rules, you should submit to it instead of spending your money on Looksmart. While "Boost your traffic with website directories" will give you most of the information you need in order to properly submit to Zeal, here's a brief overview on what exactly you need to do to get accepted:
First, you will have to register yourself as a Zealot. A slightly annoying step, but at least it doesn't cost anything. After you've done that, you'll also need to pass the "Member Quiz" before you can start the actual submitting process.
The MQ is a multiple choice test, but it isn't too easy. To pass it, open up Zeal's guidelines in another window and search the correct answers to the questions from there. Don't rush or try to guess, just accept that it is going to take a while and be patient.
Having achieved a MQ of 90 or more, which means that you answered at least 18 of the 20 questions correctly, you can finally move on. Find a suitable category for your site, but remember to check that the category is "open". Some parts of the Zeal directory are "sealed off" and you can't submit to them even if your site would fit in perfectly. If you encounter a situation where the best category of your site is labeled "commercial" and thus unavailable, simply find the most relevant category that is not commercial and submit to it.
The actual submission process is fairly simple, but if you need help, check out this series of screenshots I took while preparing this article. They are quite large and might take a (long) while to load on a slow connection, but will make submitting a piece of cake.
The MSN connection
As I mentioned in the beginning, Looksmart's partnership with MSN is the main reason the directory is so important. That is why before you submit to Zeal/Looksmart, you must ensure that you will get the maximum amount of visibility at MSN.
First, choose some keywords that are related to your site, popular and only turn up a relatively small amount of returns at MSN. Then create a description that contains these keywords, but is readable, fairly short and accurately describes your site. If you are submitting through Looksmart, don't forget to also add these words to your "Relevancy Keywords".
In the best possible case, your title should also contain a keyword or two. However, this is often impossible, because Looksmart's guidelines instruct that the title should be the official name of the site. If your site's name does not contain any keywords, don't try to fool the editors by adding them. They'll simply cut them from your title which might cause them to be tempted to edit your description as well.
Other than your title and description, there definitely are other things MSN uses to determine your ranking. Unfortunately, I must admit that I currently don't have a clue on what these things might be.
Among other things, click popularity and the presence of keywords in the name of the category you submit to have been claimed to have effect. Whether these theories hold water or not is unknown to me at this point. For now, just optimize your description and title, plus add "Relevancy Keywords" if you are purchasing a listing. I'll update this part of the article if and when I get more information about MSN's algorithm.
Paying for Looksmart?
Those who can't submit to Zeal are probably wondering whether to participate in the Looksmart pay per click plan or not. The answer to this question largely depends on how much money you can make from an average visitor to your site and how well your site is able to rank at MSN. Unless your site produces over 15 cents of profit per visitor, it is obvious that Looksmart is not worth its price.
Even if you can afford to pay what Looksmart is asking for, it might be worth it to look at other possibilities first. For example, Overture has a minimum bid of only 5 cents and is cheaper to set up. To top it off, Overture results also appear in MSN under several keywords and are placed above the results coming from Looksmart.
Submitting your website to the ODP
The Open Directory Project, or the ODP, is a directory similar in layout to Yahoo and Looksmart. ODP's biggest difference to its competitors is that it is run by over 37,000 volunteer editors, who do their work without receiving any monetary compensation. This uncommon operating model is both an advantage and problem to the ODP. Its reliance on volunteers enables the directory to process most submissions quickly, but can also create situations where an editor suddenly goes missing and causes sites submitted to his category to go unreviewed for a longer period of time.
While Yahoo charges for some submissions and Looksmart requires nearly all sites to pay, submitting your website to the ODP is completely free of charge. However, as I'm going to soon explain, the old saying "you get what you pay for" does not apply in this case.
Why the ODP?
A listing at Yahoo is usually hailed as the holy grail of website promotion, but that does not mean you should forget about submitting your website to the ODP. The ODP directory itself receives far less traffic than Yahoo or Looksmart, but because its data is used by several large search engines such as AOL, HotBot and Lycos, being in the ODP can produce a very healthy number of visitors to any site. However, as it often takes up to several months for these search engines to update their ODP data, you may have to wait for a while before the full benefit of your listing begins to show.
In addition to the traffic sent by the ODP and those who use its data, there are other advantages in being listed at the directory that are not mentioned as often but can be even more valuable. You see, the truth is that some search engines are using ODP listings in their algorithms and rank sites & pages that have been accepted into it higher than those who haven't.
This is a very sensible method, as a page that is able to get listed in a directory edited by humans has to be at least better than the average floatsam currently cluttering the web. Google has proven to be very rewarding to sites that are in the ODP, which should become quite clear to anyone who has read my article about Google's ranking algorithm. FAST also appears to be taking ODP listings into account, but perhaps to a somewhat smaller degree.
You've now heard just how valuable prize an ODP listing is and it's enough to make most search engine optimization professionals drool all over their keyboards. In order to spare valuable computer equipment from suffering any unnecessary damage, let us move on to the submission instructions.
Submitting to the Open Directory Project
From this point onwards, I assume that you've read "Boost your traffic with website directories" and understand the basic rules of directory submissions. I won't repeat those hints and suggestions in here, so if you haven't read the article yet, do so now.
Before submitting your website to the ODP, you should read through the official submission instructions. While they do not offer any secret tips or gimmicks on how to get listed, understanding them will help you avoid some of the most common mistakes made by submitters. Another very useful resource I'd recommend for everyone is the ODP's editor guidelines page, which offers some insight on what the editors want and don't want to see in the submissions they receive.
Just like with other directories, you should definitely submit the home page of your site first into the ODP. If you are able to get in, you might want to think about attempting to get one or two of your content-rich subpages listed in other categories. For example, the main page of this site has been accepted for a listing at /Computers/Internet/Web Design and Development/Promotion/Tips and Tricks/ and one of the subpages can be found at /Computers/Data Formats/Markup Languages/HTML/Meta Tags/.
Unfortunately, it is often difficult to get these additional links from the ODP, which is why only those who are convinced that their site has very good content should consider this option. Note that the editors don't look kindly to sites that over-submit or "spam" the directory, so it's usually best not to try submitting more than one or two extra pages at most. In extreme cases, excessive submissions can result in the site being completely removed from the ODP.
Some of you might already be listed in the ODP and would like to get another listing in the directory, but feel that the subpages of your site do not contain enough unique content to be submitted on their own. Creating more content is usually the best solution for the problem, but there is also another solution - offering your site in more than one language.
If you happen to be for example a Spanish web designer, you can make an English and a Spanish version of your pages, allowing you to be listed in both the English and the Spanish parts of the ODP. However, be aware that the translation must be of high quality, so using Altavista's Babelfish or similar machine-translation service to do the work will not cut it. This method does require quite a bit of work, but in addition to receiving another ODP listing, your visitors will appreciate you for making your content available in their native language.
I submitted, but didn't get in! Now what?
The ODP doesn't reject sites as easily as Yahoo, but people do occasionally run into problems while trying to get their pages accepted into the directory. If your site hasn't been listed in three weeks despite the fact that you've followed both the instructions in the "Directories" article and the ones given by ODP to the letter, it's time to take some action. Notice that the following only applies to situations where you have submitted the home page of your site. If you have attempted to submit a subpage but it hasn't been listed, I'd suggest that you simply forget the whole thing and move on to other matters.
The first step is to simply submit again. Of course, if you received a notification that explained why your site wasn't accepted, correct the problems pointed out in it first before doing anything else. If this second submission does not yield any results within a few weeks, you should at this point get in touch with the editor of the category you submitted to. You can find a link to contact him at the bottom of the page. Write a polite E-mail where you ask for the reason why your site hasn't appeared in the directory and send it. Remember to include the title, description and address of your site and also mention the dates of your first and second submission.
If you don't get a reply in a couple weeks, contact the editor of the category above you (ie. people submitting to /Computers/Internet/Web Design and Development/Promotion/Tips and Tricks/ should contact the editor of Computers/Internet/Web Design and Development/Promotion). Give him the same information you included in the first letter and explain that the reason you're sending the E-mail is that you haven't received a reply from the editor of your category. If nothing happens within a month, attempt to improve your site if possible and try to find another relevant category within the ODP where you could submit.
How to submit to Yahoo
Yahoo can still rightfully be called the king of directories, despite the efforts of DMOZ and Looksmart to dethrone it. In recent years, the directory has grown in size, its prices have risen and it has become harder to submit to it.
Even so, a listing at Yahoo continues to be worth all the trouble and money it may take to achieve one. Not only does an Yahoo listing drive highly targeted traffic to your site, but it will also boost your link popularity and Google PageRank.
What is Yahoo?
To define it in one word, Yahoo is a directory. A brief explanation on what directories are and how to submit to them can be found in "Boost your traffic with website directories". If you've already read that piece, feel free to move on. However, if you haven't, I strongly recommend that you take a look at it now.
As implied above, Yahoo uses a directory structure to classify the sites listed in it. It is run by a group of hired editors who review submissions, process requests to change the way a site is listed and handle other issues involved in maintaining the directory. In addition to the main site, there are several country/region-specific Yahoo's that list sites directly related to different countries and regions.
These days, there are two ways you can submit to Yahoo. The first one is free, but it is not available to all sites and has other drawbacks as well. The second, Yahoo Express, can be used by (almost) everyone and is fast, but also costs a pretty penny. Here, we'll cover both and hopefully help you determine which of the two suits your situation better.
Free submission
The free submission option offered by Yahoo has several limitations. First of all, it is not available in the "commercial directory". The "commercial directory" consists mostly of the "Business and Economy" category and its subcategories, which are where most commercial sites should be placed.
International Yahoos (for example Yahoo UK & Ireland and Yahoo Australia & NZ) are exceptions to this rule, because they still allow free submissions to the categories under "Business and Economy". Thus, if you have a commercial site that is targeted at a non-US audience, submitting to the appropriate international Yahoo might be a cost-effective solution.
The second limitation is that the free submission is reserved for non-commercial sites. Hence, even if you have a commercial site that belongs outside the "Business and Economy" category, the only way you'll be able to get in is through Yahoo Express.
So, what makes one site commercial and another non-commercial in the eyes of Yahoo? If you're selling a product or a service, you're commercial. On the other hand, if your site provides a lot of high quality content for free and does not have any banner ads or affiliate programs, you're non-commercial. Between these two extremes lies a large grey area.
Let's imagine that you offer a large amount of free information about baseball, but also have one or two banners on each page to cover the hosting fees. Is your site commercial or non-commercial? The answer may depend on who reviews your submission and what mood he is in.
However, generally it can be said that having one banner per page does not make you commercial, just as long as it is clear that the main purpose of your site is to distribute information. But if the editor gets the impression that you're "in it for the money", for example from seeing large amounts of links to affiliate programs or multiple banners on each page, your site will be labeled as commercial even if you aren't actually selling anything.
The worst thing about Yahoo's free submission is that it is a very slow and unreliable way to get into the directory. Usually it takes several attempts and several months before you'll be able to get your site listed, so if you're in a hurry, the free submission is not for you.
With help of the basic submission instructions in the article about website directories and these guidelines from Yahoo, you should be able to submit successfully to the directory. Despite that, sometimes submissions are rejected or left unreviewed by Yahoo editors. Thus, if your site doesn't appear in the directory within 3-4 weeks of your submission, read the section labeled "Rejected - what now?" from this article for instructions on what to do next.
Yahoo Express
For those who own a commercial site or lack in patience, Yahoo offers "Yahoo Express", a paid submission service. In exchange for promising to review your English-language site within a week, Yahoo wants you to pay a $299 ($600 if you have adult content) non-refundable fee. This fee includes one free appeal within 30 days, so if you happen to get rejected, you can fix the problems pointed out to you by Yahoo and try again without having to pay any additional fees.
Remember, this is a review fee and it does not guarantee that your site will be accepted into the directory. The only thing it guarantees is that someone will look at your site within 7 days and decide whether or not it will be added to Yahoo. So, before submitting your site via "Yahoo Express", make sure that it complies with all of Yahoo's guidelines.
Unfortunately, simply paying the initial review fee isn't enough. If you use "Yahoo Express" and are accepted into Yahoo, your site will also be re-reviewed each year on the anniversary date of your site's inclusion in the directory. This means that you'll have to pay the $299/$600 review fee once every year, and if you don't, your site will be removed from the directory.
Additionally, should your site change within the year in a way that makes it ineligible for a Yahoo listing (for example, a lot of broken images and/or links appear), it seems possible that you'll lose your listing even if you pay the yearly fee.
Naturally, a recurring annual fee would make things very difficult for non-commercial sites that wish to speed up their listing process with Yahoo Express. Paying a one-time review fee might not be out of the question, but having to pay the same fee year after year is usually impossible.
However, the annual fee only applies to sites submitted to the "commercial directory", which consists mostly of categories under "Business and Economy". Sites submitted to non-commercial categories do not have to pay the yearly review fee, even if they are submitted using Yahoo Express.
Rejected - What now? (Yahoo Express)
After spending $299 (or $600) to get your site reviewed, it feels pretty bad to receive a rejection E-mail from Yahoo. Should that happen to you, the first thing you must do is to take it easy. You still have the chance to appeal the decision within 30 days, but remember, you only have one appeal.
So, take your time and carefully fix the problems pointed out in the rejection E-mail before appealing. If your appeal is rejected, your submission fee has effectively went down the drain.
Unfortunately, Yahoo doesn't always give a very specific explanation on why your site has been rejected. Instead, they have a couple of very general reasons that they usually use to justify the rejection. Here are some of them, along with brief explanations on what they mean and what you need to do in order to successfully appeal the decision.
Yahoo says: Lack of content/not enough unique content
Solution: Add more content to your pages. Write new articles, start a message board, add a page where you collect links to other useful resources and so on. Just remember that a message board with no or very little messages is not content, neither is a links page full of affiliate links.
Make sure that the content is of high quality, can be reached easily from your front page and that there is enough of it. Publishing a few of the free articles available on the Internet is not good enough, as Yahoo really wants your content to be unique.
One possible reason for this problem is running a site that allows most of the content to be accessed solely by registered members. The editors will only examine those parts of your site that they can view with ease. If you're attempting to submit a members-only site, you must include a valid account name and password in your submission. The account must be usable for at least 90 days.
Yahoo says: Lack of backward compatibility with older browsers/doesn't display correctly
Solution: Make sure that your pages are compatible with older browsers as well as new ones. Yahoo is fairly strict when it comes to this subject, so being very careful and thorough is in order.
Your site must display correctly when viewed with IE 4, Netscape 4 or any higher version of those browsers. Supporting the 3-versions isn't a bad idea, either. In addition to meeting those demands, you'll need to support resolutions from 640x480 upwards and be Mac-friendly as well.
However, Yahoo does not require the pages to look as good in Netscape Navigator v4 with 640x480 as they might under Internet Explorer v6 with 1024x768. It is generally OK, if all the graphical bells & whistles are not there when the page is viewed with an older browser or with a lower resolution. Just as long as the design remains intact and the site is usable, you should be fine.
You should especially remember to check that the site works when JavaScript is deactivated or not available. Many sites place all of their content behind JavaScript-links, which often causes them to get rejected. Also, pages that are completely Flash-based or rely heavily on other modern techniques (CSS, DHTML and so on) frequently run into troubles when they attempt to get listed at Yahoo.
Altering an existing design in a way that makes it work with older browsers, but also preserves its good looks is sometimes impossible. In those cases, you should create a simplified version of the design and allow users the possibility to select between the two.
Again, don't worry if the "no frills" version doesn't look as classy as the other one. As long as all the information that can be accessed through the more modern version is also available via the simplified version, you should be fine.
Yahoo says: Already included/not substantially unique
Solution: This rejection notice is often sent to those who are attempting to list a sub-section of a site that is already listed in the directory. If that is the case, your chances of winning an appeal are slim, because Yahoo rarely allows more than one listing per domain. However, appealing and explaining exactly why it would be beneficial for the Yahoo directory to include the page is always worth a shot.
Try to look at the subject from their point of view. Writing an appeal that contains statements such as "it would increase the traffic to my site" is a waste of time. Should other similar sites have more than one listing, pointing them out in your appeal might also be a good idea.
What if your site is not listed in Yahoo, but you are rejected based on this reason? Such a situation may be caused by Yahoo feeling that your site has nothing unique to offer to the directory. Jump to the part labeled "lack of content/not enough unique content" to find the solution for that kind of difficulties.
Yahoo says: Under construction
Solution: Usually caused by broken links, images or "under construction" signs, so addressing the problem should be fairly easy.
You may also be rejected based on this reason if your pages break down when someone uses an older browser to look at them. See "Lack of backward compatibility with older browsers/doesn't display correctly".
Yahoo says: No address
Solution: If your site is commercial or if you are applying for a listing in a regional category, you must list your physical address on your site. At the very least, have an "About Us" or "Contact" page that contains your address, but preferably list your address on all of your pages. Giving out your phone number on your site is also a good idea, if you have a dedicated line you can spare.
Those running a home-based business might feel uncomfortable publishing their address on their site and prefer to list a P.O. Box address instead. However, in order to protect consumers from fraud, Yahoo prefers "real" addresses over P.O. Boxes. Some that have used a P.O. Box address have been able to submit successfully, while others say they have been rejected.
Also, if you own a commercial site, do include a privacy policy and terms of service.
Rejected - What now? (Free submission)
When you submit via the Free Submission option and are accepted into the directory, you'll usually receive an E-mail stating that your site has been listed. Should Yahoo choose to reject your submission instead, it's extremely unlikely that they'll E-mail you about it. So, if you don't hear anything from Yahoo within three or four weeks of your submission, consider your site to be rejected.
Before you being plotting your horrible revenge, check the Yahoo directory one more time to see if your site is listed. Occasionally, Yahoo lists sites that have been submitted via the Free Submission option, but forgets to inform the owner about the decision. Type your domain name (ie. apromotionguide.com) into the search box. If you're listed in the directory, you'll show up under "Web Site Matches" - if you're not, you'll be listed under "Web Page Matches" or not at all.
Unless you just found your site in the directory, you will have to continue your efforts to get listed. The first step is to once more check your site for problems and then submit it for a second time. Be sure that the aforementioned three to four weeks have passed since your last submission, otherwise you might be seen as attempting to spam the directory.
If your second submission doesn't produce results within a month, try contacting Yahoo at url-support@yahoo-inc.com . Send them a polite E-mail in which you ask why your site has not been accepted and what you can do to make it worthy of an Yahoo listing. Remember to include the URL of your site and the name of the category you submitted to in your letter, otherwise they won't know what submission you are talking about. Also, try to be brief as these people don't have a lot of time on their hands.
When you E-mail the above address, you will receive this automatic reply. I recommend that you read it first, as it has some instructions that may save you the trouble of contacting them.
Should you be lucky, they might answer to you and explain what you need to do in order to get listed. In the best possible situation they may even immediately list your site. However, in most cases, you will not receive a reply. If you don't get one within two or three weeks, do not E-mail them again. Instead, simply re-submit your site via the free submission yet again. Only try contacting the E-mail address for a second time if several re-submissions made at four week intervals do not produce results.
If nothing else seems to help, try visiting the Search Engine Forums Yahoo section. There are no Yahoo editors there, but several people who have very much experience of submitting sites to Yahoo visit the forum frequently. Ask them nicely to review your site and they'll surely tell you how to modify it so that it will finally be admitted into the directory.
Those who are really, really desperate can also try writing a letter to Yahoo. The address is
Yahoo! Corporation
3420 Central Expressway
Santa Clara, CA 95051, USA
How the search and the ranking system works
As important as it is to gain a listing in Yahoo, you won't profit much from it if you're listed in a way that makes it impossible to find your site. In order to be able to make your site more visible, you'll have to know a thing or two about how Yahoo works.
There are two ways a person can use to find your site at Yahoo. The first is to browse the categories and find the one your site is placed in. The other, often faster way, is to use the search feature located at the top of Yahoo's front page. In this chapter, we'll first examine how the order of sites in the categories is determined. After that, we'll move on to the search feature.
Categories
Yahoo arranges the sites in each of the categories with the same, relatively simple method. If you go and take a look, you'll notice that the sites are listed alphabetically by title. Even though the order is in most cases based on this rule, there are a few exceptions that you should be aware of.
Most popular
In many categories, there are a handful of sites listed under a heading called "Most popular". Being located among them has two advantages. One, in addition to that listing, you'll also get to keep your regular listing under the "Alphabetical" heading.
Two, sites under the "Most popular" heading are above all other sites, excluding possible sponsored ones. This makes it easier for people to find you, especially if the title of your site does not begin with an A, B or C.
So, what decides which site gets a "Most popular" status and which does not? Unfortunately, I've been unable to find a truly accurate answer to that question. However, click popularity has been said to play a large part in the process. Also, it has been noticed that the sites under "Most popular" tend to have a few things in common. They're usually well-known, large sites that have high link popularity and a high Google PageRank.
At the moment, there seems to be no "magic potion" for giving your site "Most popular" status. Fortunately, if you spend time creating a title that begins with a number or a letter that is close to the beginning of the alphabet, you'll be listed near the top anyhow.
If new information surfaces, I'll update this article. For now, I suggest working on your click popularity and link popularity / PageRank if you want to become one of the most popular.
New!
This icon is given to your site at the time it gets listed in the directory. The New! sign boosts you to the top of the category, below the Most Popular sites and above the sites that have sunglasses.
The icon lasts for a week, after which it disappears. Unless you have the sunglasses or are listed under Most Popular, you'll drop down to your appropriate place under the alphabetical listings at this point. Many sites experience a drop in their traffic from Yahoo after the first week, and the New! icon is mostly the reason why.
Sunglasses
At the time your site is reviewed for inclusion in the directory, it is also considered as a possible candidate for the sunglasses icon. If the editor reviewing your site thinks that your site is significantly better than the other sites about the same subject, you might get the sunglasses next to your listing.
Should you get the sunglasses, your site will be permanently listed above all of the alphabetical listings. The sunglasses are a fairly permanent thing and are rarely taken away once they are given.
A site may have sunglasses and be listed under Most Popular at the same time. Only sites listed in non-commercial categories can receive the sunglasses.
Search feature
Having a visible position within your category is good, but the truth is that most visitors use the search feature to find sites. Hence, if you wish to utilize the full potential of your Yahoo listing, you must ensure that your site ranks well when someone performs a search for your most important keywords.
So, how can you boost your ranking at Yahoo's search feature? The topic is too broad to be covered in this article, but you may (and should) read my article "The ranking algorithm of Yahoo" for some fairly detailed information about the subject.
It's vital to remember that your ranking is largely determined by the title, description and URL you submit to Yahoo, along with the name of the category you submit to. So, please study this subject before your first submission, as fixing an unsatisfactory listing at a later date is extremely difficult.
Final words
That's it. We've now gone over just about everything that I think you should know before you submit to Yahoo. All that is left is to wish you success and patience in your task, because you're likely to need both.
While this article might make getting listed at Yahoo seem like an impossible task, it is in reality far from it. If you want to read an encouraging real-life success story, take a look at an article that I wrote two years ago when A Promotion Guide finally made it into the big Y.
The ranking algorithm of Yahoo
Much has been written about Yahoo over the years. Webmasters have exchanged tips on how to get listed in the directory, while reporters have covered the company's past success and recent troubles. Yet, the algorithm of Yahoo's search has not attracted nearly as much attention for one reason or another. Speculation and general advice about it have been available, but only a few people have seriously attempted to explain how Yahoo ranks sites.
Recently, I was in progress of updating the article about getting listed in Yahoo on this site. While working on it, I realized that I really had to write something about Yahoo's ranking algorithm. Even while Yahoo is a directory and not a search engine, it does have a search feature which visitors often use. A site that ranks badly on Yahoo's search will miss out on a great deal of traffic that the directory could potentially produce.
So, what kind of elements is Yahoo's search algorithm built out of? For long, it's been claimed that including keywords in the title, description and/or URL you submit to Yahoo boosts your search ranking for those words. After Yahoo introduced click-through tracking on its pages, click popularity has also been said to be an important factor.
The latest theory, originating at WebmasterWorld, is that your Google PageRank also influences your ranking at Yahoo's search. As Google already provides the secondary "Web Pages" results, it wouldn't be a big surprise if parts of its algorithm were also being used to rank the primary "Web Site" results.
Investigating the effects of click popularity from the outside is quite hard. However, examining the other things that are said to influence your Yahoo ranking is relatively easy. In this article, we'll look at three search queries performed at Yahoo and the sites they turned up in order to determine how the algorithm works.
If you aren't interested in the details, you can skip to "Conclusions" for the juicy parts. Just keep in mind that this experiment contains a very limited amount of data, so it's not wise to form too strong opinions based on it.
The raw data is also available in a .txt file for those who want to examine it.
Table legend
The first query was the word "spoon", without quotes. The picture on the left clearly displays what it turned up, but as you probably aren't psychic, it's a good idea to explain the meanings of those colors, dots and lines.
Dots:
Light green dots ( ) display the PageRank of individual sites. For example, the site displayed first in the results had a PageRank of 7. Thus, the light green dot on the very left side of the table is placed on the fourth line from the top. From the PageRank scale on the left you can clearly see that the dot is in the right place.
Light blue dots ( ) display whether the site had the keyword in its title or not. If the keyword was in the title, the dot is placed near the top of the table. If no keyword was found in the title, the dot is placed near the bottom. As you can see, all the sites in the top ten had the keyword in their titles and thus all the light blue dots are located at the top of the table.
Light yellow dots ( ) display whether the site had the keyword in its description. The sites that had the keyword in the description are marked by an yellow dot placed at the top of the table, while those that didn't can be distinguished from the dot being located at the bottom of the table. By quickly looking at the table, you can see that from the sites in the top 10 for this keyword, only one had the keyword in the description while nine sites didn't.
Light grey dots ( ) display whether the site had the keyword in its URL. Should the URL contain a keyword, the dot is placed at the top of the table. Should it not, the dot can once again be found near the bottom.
Now, take a good look at the top part of the table, right were the dots representing the second site are located. See how the dot for the URL is actually above the table? The site in question happened to have two occurrences of the keyword in its URL, but as you can see, the scale on the right only goes up to 1.00. If the amount of keywords in the URL, description or title exceeds one, I've placed the dot "out of scale". This should help you notice the difference between the sites that have a description/URL/title that only contains the keyword once and those that have multiple keywords in those places.
Light red dots ( ) display whether the site had the keyword in the name of the category it is listed in. This dot follows the same rules as the three previous dots, so there probably is no need to discuss it further.
OK, enough dots! Let's move on to lines and then we can get down to the actual business, I promise.
Lines
Dark blue line ( ) displays the average amount of keywords the sites in a single part of the table had in their title. Because every site in the top ten had one keyword in the title, this value is 1.00 for sites 1-10. For sites 15-130 the value is only 0.58 and for sites 135-144 it is 0.30. Thus, the blue line starts from the very top, but falls fast close to the bottom.
Black line ( ) displays the average amount of keywords the sites in a single part of the table had in their URL. As you can see, this value starts at around 0.80, then drops to 0.38 only to rise to 0.70, near to where it started.
Dark green line ( ) displays the average PageRank for the sites in a single part of the table. If PageRank influences the results, this line should start its journey from a relatively high point, but should steadily fall until reaching its lowest point in the bottom-10 of sites. The average PR for top 10 is 5.70, for sites 15-130 it is 4.08 and for sites 135-144 it is 2.60.
Dark red line ( ) displays the average amount of keywords the sites in a single part of the table had in the name of the category they were listed in. Under this keyword it seems to be pretty stable, but does fall a bit when we reach sites 135-144.
Orange line ( ) displays the average amount of keywords the sites in a single part of the table had in their description. Works just like the other lines.
Keyword: spoon, 144 results returned
Sites 1-10, every site reviewed
Sites 15-130, every fifth site reviewed
Sites 135-144, every site reviewed
Title
When you look at the part of the table where sites 1-10 are located, a few things stand out. Perhaps the most significant of them is that every site has one instance of the keyword in its title.
After site 35, the keyword slowly starts to disappear from the title. It reappears near site 90. However, in the sites that rank below 90, the keyword is only present in the title as a part of another word. Titles such as "I am Spoonbender" and "Spooner Advocate" are common near the 100th place.
Upon reaching the "bottom ten", the "Keyword In Title"-average continues to drop. Not one site has the basic form of the keyword in its title, the only occurrences are as a part of another word.
Description
It's interesting to notice that only one of the top ten sites has the keyword included in its description. The average number of keywords per description creeps up to 0.3 for sites 15-130. Since the sites in the top ten only had an average of 0.1, this seems slightly odd.
This rise is soon followed by a decline, as none of the sites in places 135-144 have the keyword in their description. The average ends with a flat 0.00.
URL
Seven of the top ten sites have the keyword in their URL, which creates a very high average. This might indicate that having a keyword-rich URL is important for your ranking, but it may just as well simply be a matter of chance.
In the next section (sites 15-130), the average drops to slightly below 0.4. It rebounds and rises up to 0.70 in the bottom ten, which made me scratch my head a little. Does having the keyword in your URL influence your ranking in a negative way? Most likely not.
The increase is probably caused by the fact that in order to include your site in the results, Yahoo has to know that your site is somehow related to the word "spoon". Having the keyword in your URL, but not in your description, title or category is enough to get you listed under "spoon". However, it won't be enough to get you a decent ranking, causing the keyword-in-URL average for bottom-10 sites to jump.
Category
Three of the top ten sites have the keyword in the name of the category they are listed in. The average doesn't change much throughout the results. It is 0.3 for 1-10, 0.29 for 15-130 and 0.20 for the last ten sites. It does decline as we go downwards in ranking, but not enough to show a clear pattern.
PageRank
The PageRank theory seems to hold up well in the first section. The number one site is a PR 7, next three are PR6 and the rest are a mix of PR6 and PR5 sites. While some PR5 sites rank above PR6 sites, it is hardly enough to destroy the theory. After all, no one is claiming that PageRank is the only factor in determining your ranking at Yahoo.
After the top ten, the average keeps dropping steadily just as predicted. However, the picture is very mixed. Some sites located between rank 15 and 130 have a PR6, while others have a mere PR1. This search does not seem to indicate the presence of PR in the algorithm. However, "spoon" only produces 144 results, which reduces the reliability of this data.
Average PageRank still continues to drop and reaches its smallest value at 2.60 in the bottom ten. The PR of individual sites still does not produce a clean, smooth decline towards the end of the results. There is, however, one thing that catches the eye. The three last sites, #142, #143 and #144 all have zero PageRank. A coincidence?
Keyword: rally, 406 results returned
Sites 1-10, every site reviewed
Sites 15-150, every fifth site reviewed
Sites 397-406, every site reviewed
Title
Similarly to the keyword "spoon", the 1-10 sites for "rally" have an average 1.00 keywords in their title. The keyword average also declines in the same, steady way as it did in the last search. For sites 15-150, the average is still 0.82, but in the bottom ten it is just 0.1.
The average looks like it is falling faster towards the end of the results in this table, but it is not necessarily doing so in reality. Because no data is available for sites 150-397, the drop seems sharper than it really is.
Description
Again, the top ten sites seem to lack the keyword in their descriptions. Only two out of ten have it, which is not much more than what we saw for the word "spoon". The biggest shock is however yet to come, as the keywords-in-description average keeps on rising as we move downwards in the results. Sites 1-10 have an average of 0.2, 15-150 have an average of 0.25 and the bottom ten has a whopping average of 0.40.
This trend makes one wonder just how important it is to have keywords in your description, but I'm not ready to make any conclusions just yet.
URL
Was the 0.8 keyword average for "spoon" something that reflected the way the algorithm works, or was it just a random thing? The top ten for "rally" would seem to support the latter theory, as the average is now just 0.4.
Furthermore, the average amount of keywords per URL rises towards the bottom of the results in this search. Part of the rise can probably be explained by the same phenomenon that appeared to occur in the keyword "spoon". However, while "spoon" seemed to indicate that it would be hard to reach the top without having the keyword in your URL, "rally" gives hope to those who don't have a keyword-rich URL.
Category
Like the URL average, the category average behaves somewhat differently in this search than it did in the previous one. It starts out at a very high position in the top ten, 0.60. The average then slowly declines to 0.57 for sites 15-150 and arrives to its lowest point, 0.20, for sites 397-406.
Under "spoon", the average amount of keywords in category name was generally much lower. The reason for this is unknown, but it might have something to do with the nature of these words. "Rally" refers strongly to a specific sport that has its own categories within Yahoo. Many of these categories contain the word "rally" in their name.
"Spoon" on the other hand can refer to just about anything, from the Spoon River Community College to foods that can be eaten with a spoon to Teresa Weatherspoon, the WNBA basketball player. These sites are not very likely to be found in a category that has a name containing the word "spoon".
PageRank
Just like for the keyword "spoon", the top ten sites for "rally" have very similar PageRanks. The leading site has a PR 7, eight others have a PR6 and one has a PR5. This makes the average PR for the top ten a healthy 6.00.
When we move into the middle section, we are faced with results that initially seem very promising. Sites 15-55 all have a PR of five, which is exactly how things should be if PageRank played a part in the algorithm. While things seem to somewhat fall apart after that, the PageRanks of sites that have similar ranking are still much closer to each other than in our previous search.
"Spoon" only produced 144 results, while "rally" gave us over 400. For "spoon", the PageRanks of individual sites didn't seem to correlate with ranking very strongly, but for "rally", the image is much clearer. Is the increase in the number of results eliminating the "static" and giving us a better idea of what is going on? The next keyword should allow us to answer that question.
Additionally, the fact that the average PageRank again declines smoothly towards the end (6.00 for top ten, 4.61 for sites 15-150 and 2.90 for the bottom ten) also breathes life to the PageRank-theory. In both searches, the average has lined up in a way that is very exciting.
Keyword: tool, 10244 results returned
Sites 1-10, every site reviewed
Sites 15-150, every fifth site reviewed
Sites 300-350, every fifth site reviewed
Sites 2240-2290, every fifth site reviewed
Sites 5240-5290, every fifth site reviewed
Sites 10235-10244, every site reviewed
Title
This keyword confirms what the two previous ones already seemed to be telling us. Have the keyword in your title, or forget about reaching the top. Because the number of results returned is so large, the average amount of keywords in title per site holds steady at 1.00 for sites 1-10, 15-150 and 300-350.
It drops off at some point after that, because when we reach the 2240th place, the average is a flat 0.00. After encountering the 0.00 mark once, the average remains close to it throughout the rest of the results. Only one site in the 5240-5290 range has the keyword in the title which boosts the average back up a bit. This small rise can in my opinion be safely ignored, as it is more likely to be caused by chance than anything else.
Description
The data for "rally" made me wonder about the importance of including keywords in your description. "Tool" does nothing to crush these thoughts as nonsense, because it starts with a similar pattern as the two other searches did. The average for top ten is only 0.3, while for sites 15-150 it is slightly higher, 0.39.
The downward trend starts after that, but it appears to be relatively slow. Average for sites 300-350 is 0.36 and comes down to 0.27 for sites 2240-2290. It's fascinating to notice that the sites placed 300-350 have, on average, more keywords in their description than those ranked in the top ten.
Somewhere after rank 2290 things really get interesting. The keyword average jumps to 1.00 at 5240-5290 and is the same for the bottom ten. Again, we're likely to be seeing the same thing that happened with the URL average for the keyword "spoon".
However, one question comes to mind. Why is the "keywords in description"-average 1.00 for the bottom ten, but the "keywords in URL"-average 0.00 for the same sites? If this is indeed the result of the same phenomenon that appeared to occur for the keyword "spoon", shouldn't it be the other way around?
That is something I can't explain, but I do have a theory. I believe that because there are so many matches, the sites that only contain the keyword in the URL aren't included in the results at all.
URL
The URL average again produces a confusing pattern. It starts at 0.30 in the top ten, rises to 0.46 for sites 15-150, but begins to fall once we move further down in the results. In each of these three searches, the URL average has looked completely different. Stubbornly, it has refused to reveal just how important or unimportant it is.
Despite the lack of a distinct trend, or actually because of it, this data would seem to indicate that having the keyword in your URL isn't crucial to your ranking success. It may help, but it won't make or break you.
Category
The category average for the keyword "tool" doesn't fit in perfectly with the averages for "rally" and "spoon", but it is logical enough to give us some information. In all of the keywords, the average drops towards the end of the results and reaches its lowest point in the bottom ten.
However, while the results for this keyword confirm that being listed in a category that has a keyword-rich name is indeed good for you, it also brings up new questions. Why is the average for sites 1-10 so low, when it was relatively high under the two other keywords? Much more research is needed before this question can be answered with certainty.
Also, notice the spike in the graph around rank 2240-2290. While the average amount of keywords in the title drops, the average amount of keywords in the category name rises. After that, the amount of keywords in the category name drops and the amount of keywords in the description simultaneously goes up. I believe that these spikes are telling us something along the lines of "a keyword in the title is worth more than a keyword in the name of the category, which in turn is worth more than a keyword in the description".
PageRank
Finally, we get just what we've been waiting for. Once the number of results grows to over 10000, the static we saw under "spoon" and "rally" nearly completely disappears. There are still small differences, but the overall trend doesn't leave much room for debate. In my opinion, it seems clear that the theory is correct - a high PageRank improves your ranking at Yahoo, while a low one reduces it.
As with the previous keywords, the PR average smoothly diminishes when we move towards the right side of the table. Yet, it goes up between 2290 and 5240, only to fall to a minimal 0.9 for the last ten sites. Pay attention to how the rise in PR occurs at the same time as the average amount of keywords in the description goes up and the number of keywords in category name goes down.
I feel that this sends us an important message; PageRank is there, but it is not a demigod. You can improve your ranking by boosting your PR, but there's a limit to how high it will take you if your listing is not otherwise optimal.
Conclusions
Let's repeat the standard disclaimer once more, just in case. We only looked at three keywords and what's worse, we only looked at parts of them. Not all sites that were returned as results were reviewed. I wish I could have made a more thorough study, but even this small experiment has taken well over 15 hours of time and reporting its results has required around 4000 words.
Even while we've only scratched the surface, I believe that we've been able to learn something about Yahoo's algorithm. If you read the entire article, you already know most of the conclusions I made based on what we saw. However, if you decided to skip directly to the end, here is a summary of those conclusions:
Title
The most important thing you can do to your ranking is to include the keyword in the title you submit to Yahoo. If your title does not contain any keywords, you'll never rise high enough to collect a large amount of clicks.
Is including the keyword once in your title enough, or should you risk it and try to repeat the word? I didn't see a single site that had two or more instances of the same keyword in its title. That doesn't mean there aren't any, but I don't believe that having two keywords will give you a big advantage over having one. Also, trying to repeat the keyword might get your title edited or your submission rejected, so I wouldn't try it.
Description
This really surprised me. I started the experiment with the belief that having the keyword in the description is absolutely vital in order to gain a high ranking. However, the data seemed to prove otherwise. The top ten sites actually had less keywords in their descriptions than those listed after them.
Still, I don't believe that including keywords in your description will actually hurt you. It is likely to boost you upwards a bit, but I think the boost will be significantly smaller than what it has generally been claimed to be.
URL
No clear data here, so I won't make too strong conclusions either. Some words are in order, though. My current position is that having the keyword in your URL is worth something, but less than having the keyword in any of the other places (description, title, category).
Is it necessary to get a keyword rich domain name if you're desperate to reach the top ten? Not in my opinion, unless it will give you a valid reason to include your keyword in your title.
Category
Being listed in a category that has a keyword in its name definitely increases your ranking for that keyword. More than having the keyword in the URL and more than having the keyword in your description, but less than having the keyword in your title.
PageRank
Yes, I think that it influences your ranking. Less than having the keyword in your title or in the name of your category, but it does play a part. This gives a small glimmer of hope to everyone who has accidentally submitted a poor description or title to Yahoo. You can never correct the situation entirely, but it's good to know that at least there's something you can do even if you can't get Yahoo to change your description and title.
Improve search engine ranking with click popularity
While the technology has been around for quite a while, there's still relatively little information available on click popularity and its role in the algorithms of search engines. Most experts do know which engines are using it and mention click popularity once in a while, but it seems like everyone is having difficulty estimating just how much a good click popularity rating can improve your search engine ranking.
The only thing that is well-known is that in Direct Hit, the success of your site nearly completely depends on how many clicks your listing attracts. Since this search engine delivers results to MSN and several other clients, knowing the basics of click popularity is vital to every SEO.
Just what part click popularity plays in the algorithms of Yahoo, Altavista and FAST is much harder to say. It does have some effect, but search engine optimization experts are disagreeing over whether that effect is a minor or a major one.
So, if you are reading this article because you want to fare better at Direct Hit, then by all means use the tricks listed below. But if you're more interested in Yahoo, AV or FAST, my opinion is that the reward from your efforts to improve the click popularity of your site might not be big enough to make the job worth your while.
In order for this article to make sense, you must be able to understand what the term "click popularity" means. Thus, before you begin, please take the time to learn a little about the way click popularity works before reading any further. Of course, if you're already familiar with the term, you may simply continue reading this article instead.
Ethical ways to improve your search engine ranking
In order to make their click popularity algorithms work, search engines need to be able to identify individual users. If they can't tell visitors apart, they won't be able to properly follow what they do and the whole system will collapse.
The two most common methods used to track user behavior are cookies and IP addresses. Most search engines use both of them for maximum accuracy, but some rely solely on IP-based tracking. With these tools not only can they make sure they get the data they want, but they can also weed out any attempts to manipulate the system. However, later we'll discover that when there's a will, there's a way.
The first thing you should do is to make sure that all of the title and META description tags you use accurately represent the contents of the pages they are on. They should also be otherwise "human-friendly" and tuned to attract as many clicks as possible.
Even if you're not interested in boosting your click popularity, spending some time on ensuring that your META descriptions and titles are in order is a good move. The better your pages look in the search results, the more clicks they will draw and the more traffic your site will get.
Your site should also of course look good and offer content that is relevant to the search so that users will stick around once they have arrived to it. However, the most important thing is that your pages have to load up fast. Most people are still using slow dial-up Internet connections and have very limited patience. If your page does not appear quickly, they'll use the "Back" button to return to the search results and find another site. Because click popularity SE's measure the time users spend on the sites they visit, having your visitors "backing out" on you will seriously damage your ranking.
Bending the rules a bit
Now, ensuring that your site looks good in the search results, loads up fast and is otherwise an excellent place to visit is not manipulation, spam or unethical in any way. However, most of the other things you can do to get a better ranking in a system that uses click popularity are. So, if you feel that you don't want to engage in such activity, I recommend that you stop reading at this point.
Those who wish to continue reading should also note that when you're doing something the search engine feels is unacceptable, you're taking the risk of being banned from said engine. To put it bluntly, if you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
Now that we have set things straight, let us venture into the dark side. After your page has been accepted into the index of the click popularity search engine, go visit it. Do a couple of casual searches, visit some of the sites for a few of minutes and then come back.
Next, search for your page by using the keyphrase you are trying to get a top ten ranking on. Keep digging until you find your page and then click on its listing to get to your site. When you've arrived there, close the browser window and do not visit the search engine at least for an hour or so.
Because your IP address has been logged, do not try to repeat this process until a couple days have passed. Before doing it again, you should also clear out any cookies the search engine might have installed to your system. In Internet Explorer 5, this can be done by clicking Tools -> Internet Options -> Settings -> View Files and deleting all of the files in that folder.
Notice that cookies are also commonly used to store other information, such as passwords and user ID's of online discussion forums and such. That is why I recommend that you do not attempt playing with these things unless you know what you're doing and have written all of your user ID's and passwords down somewhere or remember them.
Naturally, at the rate of one click every two days it might take your page quite a while to get to the top. So, if you happen to have friends, relatives or other acquaintances that have their own computers and are willing to help you, you can instruct them to follow the above instructions and give your page(s) a click every now and then. Just as long as you are using different computers at different locations and remember to clear your cookies, it's very unlikely that someone at the search engine would notice what you're doing.
Playing hardball
Clicking your own listing and having your friends help you may not be entirely honest, but it isn't a very serious offense either. Too bad that because you have to keep a long waiting period in between clicks, boosting your ranking in that way is a long and frustrating process. There are easier ways than that, but they're more risky as well.
One of these faster methods is using non-transparent proxy servers that are open to the public. They will mask your IP-address, which fools the search engine into thinking that you're someone else than you really are, just as long as you remember to delete any cookies possibly used by the SE and change the proxy server in between clicks.
While the risk of being caught for doing so is minimal, the legality of using proxies without the permission of their owners is unclear and thus I'm not going to discuss this method any further. If you're interested in it, here is a list of open proxy servers.
A second way that some have used, or at least attempted to use to improve their ranking in search engines that use click popularity is preventing users from using the "Back" button in their browsers.
While this may work, it is a medicine that tends to cure the disease but kill the patient in the process. You might be more successful in search engines that use click popularity and get a few additional visitors because of it, but your overall traffic will decline because this "feature" will annoy people and drive them off your pages. Take my advice and leave the Back button alone.
In conclusion
If you want to play nice, you can get fairly good results just by tuning your site and your descriptions a bit. It won't produce fast results, but over time it is the most effective way to improve your search engine ranking.
Those who wish to conquer the top spots promptly and aren't worried about ethical questions or the possibility of being banned might want to look into proxy servers and other ways of artificially inflating click popularity.
However, they should also remember not to get carried away with their "spamming" methods. If a search result normally receives one click per day and suddenly that figure jumps into 10 000 per day, it is the equivalent of calling the SE and begging them to remove your site from the database.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a technique that is used to display different pages to the search engine spiders than the ones normal visitors see. The usefulness of this ability results from the fact that good search engine optimization often requires sacrificing some of the visual attractiveness of the page and changing the textual content into somewhat search engine friendly. As a result, a well-optimized page may look unattractive to human visitors.
With cloaking, one can create two sets of pages: the first for search engine spiders, the second for regular human visitors. This enables retaining the good look and feel of the site for humans, while still being able to show highly optimized pages to the spiders and thus generate nice amounts of traffic from the search engines. Cloaking also prevents humans from seeing what kind of optimization techniques you are using and stealing your optimized pages.
One of the big questions with cloaking is how to tell whether the arriving visitor is a search engine spider or a human. Identification is usually done either by checking the visitors' IP address, or his User-agent string. The former is more secure and generally a better solution, but requires a comprehensive up-to-date database of known spider IP's, which takes a lot of work to gather and maintain (these lists can also be bought, which is sometimes the best option). The latter is easier to maintain, but is generally considered way too insecure to be used.
Cloaking is often confused with doorway pages and hiding text by making it the same color as the background, but it has nothing to do with those two. As said above, cloaking only makes sure that the search engine spider gets another page and the human visitors get another. Cloaking does not in any way effect the contents of those two pages - the hard work of optimizing and creating them is left for the webmaster. But even while cloaking is not a spamming technique in itself, many search engines dislike it and will punish sites that are cloaking their pages.
Possible punishments include burying the site so deep in the results that it will never see the sun again, or completely banning it from the index. For example, Altavista and Inktomi have been known to punish cloaking sites every now and then. You should also be careful when cloaking for Google, not because they are especially efficient in catching cloakers, but because they have a "cache" feature that allows visitors to their search engine to see the same content the spider saw when it visited your pages. Fortunately you can prevent Google from doing this if you wish by inserting a <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"> tag in the HEAD section of your pages.
The risk level involved with cloaking greatly depends on what you're actually doing with it. If you have a strong, IP-based cloak, your Title, Meta Description and the first row of text are the same with both your search engine optimized and your visitor optimized pages and the sizes of those pages (in KB's) are close to each other, you're pretty safe. With things like this, you're never completely safe, but that's pretty much as close to "safe" as you can get.
On the other hand, if you're running a cloak that relies solely on User-agent strings for spider detection or an IP-based cloak without a good IP database, you're asking for trouble. And if your SE-optimized pages and user-optimized pages don't obey by the safety rules outlined above, you're pretty likely to burn your fingers in the fire. In any case, you should always be prepared for the worst when you're cloaking - you might get banned, so have some extra cash available to buy another domain name to play with.
The troubles with cloaking do not entirely lay with the threat of getting punished by the search engines. Running a good cloak takes a great deal of work, especially if you are planning to create a specially optimized page for each engine instead of one general search engine optimized page.
That being said, the real question is "Do I need to cloak?". If you're fighting for extremely competitive keywords, then it might be a good idea to consider cloaking after you're familiar enough with the search engine optimization techniques to get the most out of the benefits cloaking can bring. But keep in mind that maintaining a cloak does require a lot of work and often also money.
So, unless you're really sure you're going to need it in your promotion efforts, I wouldn't recommend cloaking just because you can. If you still decide to cloak, it might be a good idea to buy a phony domain and experiment with it first - after gathering some confidence and experience, you could expand your cloaking to your serious website(s).
CSS Tricks & Tips
Since its early days, HTML has offered us many ways of altering the appearance of text. We have been able to create headings, bold text, text in italics and so on. With these tools, it has been easy to emphasize important words and ideas by making them stand out from the rest of the content.
Naturally, search engines have also noticed these features. They know as well as we do that headings and bolded words usually tell a lot about the contents of the page. So, they've adjusted their algorithms to place more weight on a word that appears in a heading, or in bold, than to one that just appears in the body text.
For a designer, the matter in which search engine algorithms work can be a problem. Search engines may like H1-sized headings, but many visitors consider them to be ugly. As long as the content of your pages has any effect on their ranking, there will always be a conflict between what search engines and users want.
These issues are usually solved by cloaking the page, which enables the designer to show one design to search engines and another to humans. However, cloaking takes plenty of work and sometimes money. If only minor visual changes are required to please both parties, a simpler solution would seem sufficient.
What is this thing called CSS?
As the Internet has developed, HTML has received an add-on called Cascading Style Sheets. This new language opens the possibility of altering the visual representation of pages without the use of HTML.
While search engines still do not understand CSS very well, nearly all browsers support it to some degree. TheCounter.com's statistics for March 2002 show that over 95% of their visitors use browsers with at least partial CSS support (IE3 or later, NN4 or later). This means that by using CSS, you can currently provide somewhat different-looking content to search engines and other visitors.
Although CSS doesn't offer the same flexibility and protection as cloaking, it is well-suited for making small design changes. You should however keep in mind that while an overwhelming majority of browsers understand CSS, most of them do not support all of its features. To avoid nasty surprises, it is best to check your pages in both NN4 and IE4. As more recent versions of these browsers have better CSS support, you're usually safe if your tricks work in the 4's.
To get something out of this article, you should know the very basics of CSS. If you're completely unfamiliar with the language, visit the CSS tutorials at HTML Help or House of Style.
What can you do with CSS tricks?
There are some "legal" things you can do with CSS. For example, you can use it to build your layout or to slightly adjust the size of your headings and body text. However, because loads of tutorials have already been written about those subjects, we won't be looking at them more closely.
Instead, we'll focus on the darker side of CSS tricks. Many search engines consider the techniques we're about to discuss to be spam, and may ban your site if you choose to use them. Using CSS to cheat the engines isn't safe - it's just somewhat safer than doing it with the traditional HTML method.
I do not use the tricks listed below, nor do I advise anyone to do so. However, they are included for informational purposes and for the pleasure of those who like to take risks. Just don't come crying to me when your site gets banned, because that is what's likely to happen sooner or later.
Making links vanish
Some search engines take outbound links into account when they rank your page. For example, linking to a well-known page about root beer and including the words "root beer" in the link text could boost your ranking for those words.
Occasionally, it would be nice to get this advantage without encouraging visitors to leave the site. The solution is to use a bit of CSS to hide the link from human visitors. Because search engines don't see what is happening on the screen, they can't differentiate the hidden link from the normal links on your page.
Simply include the following in an external CSS file:
A.sample { text-decoration: none; color: black; cursor: text }
This removes the underline from the link and changes its color to black. Should the browser support CSS2, it will also prevent the cursor from turning into a hand when it is located above the link.
Then use the following in your HTML:
<A class="sample" HREF="targetaddress">link text</A>
To perfect the transformation, use this JavaScript along with the above CSS. The script can easily be configured to prevent the status bar from changing when the pointer is over the hidden link.
Hiding H1's, bold text and text in italics
As already mentioned, many search engines place additional weight to words that appear inside these tags. Cancelling the visual changes caused by the bold and italic tags is fairly uncomplicated. Again, add the following string of code into your external CSS file:
.style { font-weight: normal; font-style: normal }
After doing that, fooling the search engines into thinking that your keyword is bolded or in italics is easy. To achieve this, just use:
<B class="style">non-bolded text</B>
<I class="style">this is not in italics</I>
H1 headings can also be made to imitate normal text. Add this to your CSS file:
H1.type { font-size: 100% ; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal }
Whenever you wish to, you can now apply the following tag:
<H1 class="type">small-sized H1 heading</H1>
Invisible text in many ways
The oldest trick in the book is to place keyword-rich text on a page and then hide it from humans. In the past, this was usually done by using the same color for the background and the text. However, search engines have figured this trick out long ago, so hiding text with HTML tags is definitely out of question.
CSS makes it possible to add several new twists to the old trick.
Classic style
This trick is best used in combination with HTML. First, define for example a black background color, red text color and a background image in the HTML of the page:
<BODY BGCOLOR=black TEXT=red BACKGROUND="white.gif">
Of course, white.gif should be nothing more than a fully white image. So, most visitors would see red text on a white background, while those with background images turned off would see red text on a black background.
Now, let's suppose you were to create a CSS class that turns the text color to white:
.adjust { color: white }
Because the background image is white, a paragraph such as
<P class="adjust">blah blah blah</P>
would be extremely hard to spot. Basically, this trick works exactly in the same way as the classic HTML "invisible text" trick did. However, because CSS has been added to the mix, search engine robots won't be able to notice it as easily.
But why are we setting the background color to black in the HTML? Well, we're simply placing a safeguard just in case we happen to encounter a very intelligent spider.
Comparing the HTML background color statement with the text color defined in CSS is hard for spiders, but not impossible. On the other hand, comparing the color of the background image with the CSS-defined text color is much, much harder.
With layers
The classic invisible text trick doesn't really hide anything, it just camouflages the text so that it doesn't stand out from the background. The more advanced solution is to use layers and position them off the chart:
.position { position: absolute; width:180px; height:75px; z-index:3; left: -220px; top: -95px; visibility: visible }
Then use the following code in your HTML:
<DIV class="position">A few words of keyword-rich text</DIV>
This trick doesn't make the text disappear, either. It just positions the text to a place where users with graphical browsers that support CSS won't be able to see it.
When using this trick, it's vital to remember that the negative values of "left" and "top" must exceed the positive values of "width" and "height". Simply put, "width: 132px; height: 85px" together with "left: -165px; top: -100px" is OK, "width: 132px; height: 85px" combined with "left: -100px; top: -75px" is not.
Invisible? You ain't seen nothing yet
Of course, the ultimate way of hiding something is making it non-existent. One CSS property, display, provides us with the power to do just that:
.example { display: none }
<P class="example">Text you don't want users to see</P>
The "display: none" instructs the browser to render the document as if the above HTML tag and its contents did not even exist. Naturally, "display: none" isn't limited to the P tag, it can be used with all other HTML elements as well.
Minimize your risk
If you're planning on starting to seriously play with CSS tricks, I recommend that you only use external stylesheets that are linked from the HTML. Also, don't forget to create a robots.txt file that forbids spiders from grabbing the external CSS file. Although most spiders usually ignore external CSS files, some have on occasion requested them. It's better to be safe than sorry.
While the examples on this page use class selectors, you'd be wise to use type selectors instead. Class selectors are an inferior solution for this purpose and I only chose to use them to make the examples easier to understand.
Doorway pages
Doorway pages are pages that have been designed for one purpose only, to rank high in the search engines for a particular keyword and then direct the arriving visitors further into the site. Usually their design is relatively simplistic and includes a lot of text, but contains very little graphics or other fancy effects.
However, the focus on textual content doesn't mean that these pages are heavy on useful information. Their text often consists of the same phrase(s) being repeated over and over again or is just generic marketing babble spiced with multiple instances of the keyword the doorway page is targeted at.
Because of their unattractiveness and their lack of interesting content, it isn't common to link to doorway pages from other pages of the site, at least not with links the users can easily see. This makes doorway pages an one-way street - you can arrive to the site via them, but if you come to the site by using other entrances, you'd see no trace of the existence of these pages.
Why are doorway pages used?
Many sites base their designs on Flash, JavaScript and plenty of images. They may please the eyes of the visitors, but the search engines can't understand these elements and because of that, such pages receive a very low ranking in most cases. If the webmaster wishes to receive any traffic at all from the search engines, he has three possible ways of correcting the problem.
The first way is to compromise by removing some of the design features that aren't appreciated by the search engines and adding things that the search engines can index. This means increasing the amount of plain text on the page and in some cases can also require a complete redesign of the site. Due to the time and money required to implement such changes and because the search engine friendly version might not look as beautiful as the old one, many webmasters aren't too keen on selecting this method.
The second way is to start cloaking. This solves the problem without having to change the content seen by visitors. Unfortunately cloaking requires quite a bit of effort from the webmaster as it needs continuous maintenance in addition to the work involved with setting up the system, so this solution also has its own problems.
The third way is to keep the old design and add external pages that are specifically designed to perform well in the search engines - doorway pages. This is probably the easiest and fastest solution and that is why it is, or at least has been, so popular among siteowners.
What is wrong with doorway pages?
Because creating doorway pages used to be so easy, especially when using programs that can automatically generate hundreds or thousands of pages in a heartbeat by using a simple template and merely placing the keywords in the right places, many sites lost control and created enormous amounts of them.
The search engines initially tolerated this behavior, but as their databases started being filled with doorway pages they soon realized that these pages would quickly conquer the top ranking spots from normal content-rich pages. This would reduce the quality of their indices and lower the value of the search results, resulting in users abandoning the search engine.
So, what did they do about it? Took action, of course. Altavista for example begun removing doorway pages from its index and in some cases even banning the sites that were using them. Other engines followed suit and soon it was safe to say that the age of doorway pages, at least in the form we used to know them, had passed.
In the light of these events, I would recommend that you focus on optimizing your actual content pages instead of creating doorway pages. While that may be somewhat more difficult as you'll have to attempt to please both the search engine algorithms and the human visitors with the same page, it is certainly a less risky approach. If you at some point start feeling that you don't have enough pages and can't target all of the keywords you'd like to because of that reason, just create more content for your site.
While doorway pages can only be used to attract traffic from the search engines, a well-optimized page that has good content can get visitors from the search engines AND make people spread the word about your site. Talk about killing two birds with one stone, eh?
Content pages also have one other advantage over doorway pages - it is easier to get people to link to them. Link popularity plays an important part in many of the algorithms of today's search engines, decreasing the value of old-fashioned doorway pages even more.
Still want to do it? Tips on how to make good doorway pages.
I believe that the above arguments should be enough to convince most people not to make doorway pages and to optimize their content pages instead. But if you're not convinced and still want to create doorways despite reading my thoughts, at least do it properly. Here are some suggestions that should help you build doorway pages that are a notch above the creations of most of the other webmasters:
Try to make the doorway pages look as they were a part of your site. Don't include a "click here" link or use a redirect; instead, add your site's navigation menu on the doorway page and let users use it to get to your actual site. If you absolutely have to redirect people, always use an external JavaScript redirection script instead of META refresh tags.
Don't use a template or a purpose-built program to create your doorways. Create them by hand, your chances of getting caught will be significantly lower.
Make your doorways look good. Pages that have just black text on a white background will scare off a big part of visitors. They also stick out like a sore thumb and increase the possibility of your doorway page being detected by competitors who might drop a note to the search engine's spam department about your pages.
Attempt to include at least a small part of real content into the text you use on your doorway page. At the very least the text has to be readable and understandable, placing a mere list of random words on the page is a deadly mistake.
If you make doorways that are specifically optimized to match the algorithm of one search engine, use a robots.txt file to prevent other search engines from grabbing the page. If a search engine happens to find for example five versions of the same doorway page that are all identical except for small changes you've made to account for the differences in the algorithms of search engines, you can get into trouble.
Generally, I think that engine specific doorways are a bad idea and that it is better to start cloaking if you want to feed different pages to different engines, but if you still want to create them, a robots.txt file is a must.
Enough is enough. If you have to use doorways, limit the numbers. Don't make hundreds of doorway pages.
Remember that even if you obey all of those rules, you're not safe. You will have a smaller risk of being detected and banned, but it can happen. Don't say that you haven't been warned..
Ranking high at Google
When Google went online in late 1997, it entered a market that was already filled by several other competitors. To mention a few, Altavista, HotBot, Excite, Infoseek and Lycos had all managed to claim their own share of the searching industry. Despite being late in the game, in four years Google has managed to secure a place for itself in the search engine world.
While many of the search engines that used to dominate the field have now fallen or become shadows of their former selves, nothing seems to be able to stop the success of Google. After gaining the position of providing secondary results to Yahoo from Inktomi in 2000, Google broke into the big league. Claiming to serve over 70 million searches each day through its own site and its affiliates, Google can arguably be called the most important and powerful search engine of today.
What has made Google grow so fast? Will they be able to continue their outstanding performance? Is it possible that they will be able to reach profitability without having to stuff the pages with advertisements like other search engines have done? Those are interesting questions and I could offer a theory or two to answer them, but I won't.
What you and I are really interested in is how to grab our own small share of the enormous amount of traffic Google sends out to sites that are listed in its index. That is why the only thing I'll try to do in this article is to give you some insight on the ranking algorithm used by Google. Such knowledge is vital, because without it you will be unable to rank highly on the index and shall never receive the amount of traffic you had wished to.
Random thoughts before we begin
The most cautious (or paranoid) of you might have already started to wonder why I'm willing to share my views on the algorithm. After all, detailed information on the ranking methods used by different search engines can rarely be found on the web. Most search engines attempt to protect their secrets as well as they can, but occasionally someone spots a pattern and is able to "crack" the algorithm at least partially and is able to send his sites rocketing to the top.
However, these persons don't usually share their secrets with others. Why should they? In these days, the Internet is not the hippie land of flowers and love anymore. If you know how to secure good positions in the search engines, your site will get hits. If you are able to get hits, you will be able to make a nice amount of money. You'd have to be a fool to tell anyone about your experiences with the algorithms of search engines, because if you did, you'd suddenly find out that someone used your own weapons against you and dropped your pages out of the top ten.
So why the heck am I willing to give you some guidelines without charging you for it, like some of the other sites do? Well, general search engine optimization info is commonly available on several sites for free, but like I said, it is very difficult to find up-to-date information on the algorithms of specific engines. I'm kind of flattered with the thought of doing something fairly unique, offering information that very few others are willing to share.
If my ideas about Google's algorithm are even remotely correct, I have achieved this goal, even while it probably means that I'll have to fight a more difficult battle to rank my pages highly at Google in the future as this information keeps spreading. On the other hand, if I'm wrong, I can always say that you got exactly what you paid for.
In addition to the above, I have other reasons as well. Frankly, I'm sick and tired watching people spend tens or hundreds of dollars to buy books or subscriptions to web sites that promise to reveal all the ranking secrets you could imagine. Don't get me wrong, if the information is accurate, paying for it is a honest deal, but too often you notice that you paid for something you could have (or should have) been able to get for free. And what about those of us who just aren't able to pay? Throughout the history of the web, the search engine optimization game has become more and more difficult for the small guys as the Internet has grown and advanced. This article is my attempt to level the playing field a little.
What makes me the expert on this subject? Who am I to stand up and paint myself as an authority? To tell you the truth, not much. I don't work for the search engines and I don't have any secret contacts at Google that would be willing to give me the details of the algo. But I have achieved Top 10 rankings on competitive 2-word keyphrases with around 500,000 returns, which isn't a bad achievement in my book, especially while some of these words are often targeted by those who do posess fairly strong knowledge about search engine optimization. In any case, I'm not attempting to say that I have the best or most detailed information about this subject. All I can offer is to share what I know and hope that it will be of use to you.
OK, you've probably heard enough talk without any hard facts. Let us begin.
Ranking high at Google - key number one
While there are numerous things measured by the Google algorithm, one thing seems to outweigh every other aspect. I'm talking about listings in the Open Directory Project. Google seems to heavily favor sites and pages that are listed in there. At the very least, you will have to be able to get your root/index page into the ODP. Attempt to include your most important keywords in the title and in the description you submit to the ODP. Having these words in the name of the category you're submitting to or in the URL you submit are also things that might have a positive effect, but I am unsure whether they produce a significant benefit or not.
After you have been able to squeeze your index page into the directory, try to do the same to as many of your subpages as you can. ODP's rules state that in most cases, they will only list one page per site, but I've seen plenty of sites that have at least five subpages listed. Be careful while doing this, because excessive submitting can in extreme cases result in all of your pages being dropped from ODP and your site banned for life.
The minimum requirement is to make sure that each page has plenty of useful, unique content that is relevant to the category you are submitting to. It might also pay off to keep a brief "cooling off" period in between submissions. Never, ever even attempt to get all of the pages on your 200-page site into ODP.
Again, include your most important keywords both in the title and the description you submit to the ODP. For example, if you sell cars in your online store called "Auto Shop", have a subpage about Ferrari Testarossa and you want it to rank highly for those words, the title and description you submit to ODP should be something like:
Title: "Auto Shop's Ferrari Testarossa page"
Description: "Read about the history of Ferrari Testarossa, learn about its driving characteristics, visit a gallery of pictures or buy the thing!"
Got it? For each page, select one unique keyphrase, get it into the title and the description and submit. Choose the keyphrase carefully, because once you've submitted, it can be difficult to change the information you have entered. Repeat this process as many times as you dare, selecting content-rich pages from your site and submitting them into different categories.
This is a case of greed versus fear - if you're too frightened to try, you'll never get anything. But if you let your greed push your brains into the background.. you'll lose everything you already had. Should you want to get further details on submitting your website to the ODP, simply read my article about the subject.
Ranking high at Google - key number two
At this point, you hopefully have at least one, but preferably a couple listings at ODP with perfect descriptions and titles. The next part is to optimize the HTML code of the pages to match Google's algorithm as well as you can. While I believe that the ODP listings are the most important factor in the ranking, a completely unoptimized page that is listed in ODP can certainly be beat by a well-optimized page that is not in it. Of course, the best combination is a page that is both optimized and listed in the directory, what is exactly you should shoot for.
OK, let's take a look at the various areas of page optimization for Google:
Title: The keyword or phrase should be included in the title of the page. However, it is probably best to include other words in addition to the keyword as well. For single keywords or two word phrases, I'd consider a title of 3-5 words in length to be the best choice.
Headings: Placing the keyphrase in a H1 or H2 heading at the very beginning of the page seems to work well. I have seen pages that rank high without headings, but it would seem to me that a good heading makes the job a bit easier. For the heading, I generally use just the keyword or keyphrase without adding any other words into it. If the page in question is a very long one, using a H3 heading with the keyword in it every now and then to retain the focus doesn't seem to hurt.
Density: Google doesn't seem to be too picky about keyword density, just as long as the keyphrase is found often on the page. In many cases, Google seems to tolerate and even like very high keyword densities.
The page should be somewhat "front-heavy", meaning that you should work the first instance of the keyword somewhere very near to the beginning of the page and make it appear once or twice fairly close to this first keyword, scattering the rest across the page.
Special words: Including the keyword in link text or in bold text does seem to give a slight advantage, but is not mandatory in my opinion. If I would have to choose between the two, I'd see using the keyword in link text as more important than using it in bold.
Meta tags: Not useful with Google, but you won't get into trouble for using the standard keyword and description tags either. Include them or leave them out, your choice.
Link popularity: As said, ODP links are gold, but links from other respected sources, especially Yahoo, can be very valuable as well. Links from normal pages, if you have a large number of them pointing at the page you're optimizing, will provide a good edge against the competition.
Themes: Haven't seen them playing a part in the Google algorithm, except if you count relevant link popularity as a part of themes.
Click popularity: Not in use.
There you have it, the outlines of the Google algorithm as seen by me. Not very complicated, is it? I hope that the information you've read has been detailed enough to give you some ideas on how to improve your ranking and get more traffic to your site.
The next project I'm planning is to examine Altavista's and FAST's algorithms closer, but I'm currently a bit in the dark as to what comes to those. If I get them nailed one day and if the feedback from this article is positive, you might get to read an article about them sometime in the future. Only time will tell.
Keyword optimization
Keyword optimization, the art of choosing the correct keywords, is one of the most important things related to search engine optimization. Sadly, it's also one of the things people tend to spend too little time on. They think up a few keywords quickly, optimize their pages a bit and then submit them to the engines. This usually results in not-so-good rankings under keywords that are poorly related to the site in question.
Before you start optimizing your site for the search engines, you should spend some time in figuring out exactly what keywords, or what keyphrases, you are going to target. Search engines are an excellent source of traffic, but in order to utilize them to their full potential, some effort is required.
What you should do is not to rush things. Sit down, open up your favorite text editor in one window and your site in another. Read through the first page of your site. When you have read it, stop to think. What is this page about? Which of the words that appear in the document describe the contents of the page accurately? What kind of words or phrases would someone use if he was using a search engine and trying to find documents like this?
When you have found the answers to these questions, write down the words and the phrases you have come up with. It doesn't matter if the list becomes too long, as you can always remove some of the excess words later.
When I do keyword optimization, I usually select one or two medium-popular keywords or phrases per page. These are my main targets, and I optimize heavily for them. Then I squeeze a few less common phrases and words into the body text, hoping that they will help the page to come up on some obscure multi-word searches.
Repeat this process for every page on your site. You should be able to create an individual, distinct list of keywords for each page. The different lists should not "compete" with each other, instead each should cover different areas. This does not however mean that there shouldn't be any similarities between your lists - it's perfectly OK to have some, but the lists shouldn't be 100% identical. It is better to have 20 good listings on different search terms than 20 good listings on the same one.
So, now you have your lists ready. The next thing would be to go to Overture's (GoTo) keyword suggestion tool and type in the different keywords and phrases you've come up with. The tool will tell you how many times each keyword and each phrase was searched at Overture during the last month. It won't tell you exactly how popular different words are, since the statistics contain only the searches executed at Overture, but it will give you a general idea.
Because Overture's data is not always 100% accurate, you may also want to visit WordTracker. The service is not free, but the trial option offers a chance to search for good keywords without having to pay a dime. By using both Overture and WordTracker and comparing what they think about the popularity of different keywords, you should be able to separate the words people search for from those that are rarely used.
If some of the words you were planning to select aren't commonly used in searches, you might want to consider dropping them from your list. If other words look like they are used quite a lot, then it might be a good idea to consider adding them. But remember to...
Keep the search engine optimization process in mind!
By now, your list is probably pretty full of very competitive, single-word terms such as "MP3" or "books" or "computers" or whatever. Scratch them. This might sound harsh, but if you're a novice, you have no chance of achieving a top listing under such terms. Even many (dare I say most) professionals tend to avoid them, as they are extremely competitive. There are hundreds of thousands of sites targeting them and even with excellent search engine optimization skills, they are very tough to conquer. What you should do is to narrow it down a little.
Think about different variations of these popular keywords. If you were originally thinking about the keyword "books", how about "buy used books online" or "antique bookstore"? These terms would be, not easy, but easier to rank well under. It is far better to be in the top 10 for a search term with medium usage than to rank 500th for a heavily used term. Select keyphrases that do get searched, but that aren't too competitive.
You might also want to target common misspellings, if some of the keywords related to your site are often spelled wrong . Unfortunately, it is hard to efficiently target misspellings without damaging the authority of your site. Would you buy anything from a person that can't even spell the name of his merchandise? Didn't think so.. So, be careful with those misspellings.
At this point, you should have completed your keyword optimization process and now possess a pretty good list of medium-popularity keyword phrases for each of your pages. I would recommend that you read the search engine optimization article on this site next. It will show you where you should place the keywords you have selected in order to achieve results with the search engines.
Link popularity
Based on what I've seen when I've analyzed top ranking pages in search engines, and on what many other search engine optimization experts have told me, link popularity (the amount of links other sites have pointing to your site) is becoming a more and more important factor when determining how high a site will rank on the results list.
Google paved the way for link popularity as a relevance factor (their algorithm uses link popularity as a major factor when ranking pages) and their success has not gone unnoticed among other engines. Altavista and Inktomi for example seem to be following this trend and are apparently decreasing the amount of attention they pay to the actual page submitted to them.
Instead, they are placing more and more weight to how many other sites are linking to the page, what kind of sites are they and what kind of text is located in/near the links. It seems that links from sites dealing with the same subject as you and links from very popular sites (such as human-edited directories like ODP and Yahoo) can help your ranking in the search engines, while links from low quality sites such as FFA's and other random link lists will often be ignored completely.
This change of policy by some major engines is probably caused by the massive amount of doorways and other worthless machine-generated pages that have been flooding their indexes. The logic is that pages other people think are valuable resources will often get linked by other webmasters, while pages that are of low quality or do not contain any information at all will not gain many links - thus, the Top10 places will be filled with sites people regard as useful.
I'm afraid that this change might make it even more difficult for small and new sites to make it to the top and favor big, high-traffic commercial sites, but only time will tell if this change is going to make things better or worse. But it's no use to complain or get depressed about changes in search engine policies - we're just going to have to live with them no matter what.
How to build your link popularity
The emphasis on link popularity makes two things even more important than what they have been. The first is, as always, content. Good content ensures that other webmasters link to your site just because they think it's a valuable resource to their visitors - giving you traffic from the links, and a boost in your search engine rating too! The second thing is reciprocal links. They will also have a "double effect", increasing your visitors from the links and from search engines. The more links you have pointing to your site, the better.
There are also some "link-share" services, for example LinksToYou, that are designed to boost your link popularity. The way they work is simple: Each member of a link-share program places a machine-generated page on his site and links to that page from his front page. The machine-generated page has links to all other sites participating in the program. Each member submits his machine-generated page to all search engines, and the result is that each member has a link to his site from everyone else.
These programs have produced some positive effects in the past, but many search engines now regard them as spam and some completely ban sites that participate in these programs. Additionally, given the current emphasis on links from similar sites by the search engines, they are in most cases completely useless or even harmful, which is why I would strongly recommend that you do not participate in them. Focus on creating good content and establishing reciprocal links instead.
When acquiring links by using FFA's, reciprocal links or any other methods, try to get your primary keywords into the link text. For example, getting someone to link me like this: A Promotion Guide - Free website promotion tutorial would be excellent for my search engine placement, because it would contain the two most important keyphrases for my site; 'promotion' and 'website promotion'.
On the other hand, a link such as this: click here to see a cool site wouldn't be as good, because it doesn't contain any words that are related to site promotion. You can aid this process by naming your site so that it contains at least one of your important keywords - people will often use the title of your site when linking to you.
In order for all these tricks to work, you must remember to submit any pages that link to your site to the search engines, unless they have already been submitted by the site owner. People will often link to your site without letting you know they have done so, so some will fall trough the cracks, but at least submit those you have knowledge of.
To check your link popularity, you can either visit the engines and check it from there, or you can use this free link popularity checker (http://www.linkpopularity.com). It currently supports Google, MSN and Yahoo.
Meta tags
Meta tags are little lines of code that are placed between the <HEAD> and the </HEAD> tags in your site's HTML code. They are designed to give search engines instructions on what your page is about and how they should treat it. These tags are not displayed to humans visiting your site, but they can be used to influence the way your site appears in the search results.
There are several meta tags that you can add to your pages, but in my opinion the only useful ones are the keywords tag, the description tag and the robots tag. Most others, like the author or distribution tags are not used by the search engines, and I don't recommend using them - you don't want to clutter the top part of your page with useless things, as it can have a negative impact on your ranking.
Let's take a look at the most important meta tags:
Meta tags: The description tag
<META name="description" content="A search engine shows the content of this tag below the title of your site when it appears in the results.">
This tag is very important, since you can use it to encourage people to click on your listing when you are found in a search engine. When your page comes up in the search results, the contents of your META description tag are displayed right below the title of your page. If no description tag is found, the search engine attempts to create a description for you and often fails to describe your page properly.
It's worthwhile to pay some attention to fine-tuning the META description tags you use on your pages. The main reason why you should do so is that the two things that determine whether you'll get people to click on your listing or not are this tag and the title of your page. If you're going to work hard enough to grab a position in the first page of results, you wouldn't want visitors not clicking on your listing just because it looks uninteresting, now would you?
Make your description meta tags short but informative - if you can trim them to less than 13 words and you feel that they can still give enough information to make the user visit your site, you've done well. If your description tag is over 13 words, try to think how you could reduce the amount of words and still say what you want to say.
Why should your description meta tags be so short? Well, usually the search engine only displays a small part of it in the results list, and if the tag contains too many words, the "extra" words are cut off. So a description like:
"Mike's homepage! If you visit my site, you'll find a huge amount of information about my favorite food, hot dogs!"
Can look like:
"Mike's homepage! If you visit my site, you'll find a huge amount..."
If the user is looking for information about hot dogs, he probably won't visit Mike's site even if it has a high ranking on the result list, because the user doesn't see that it's contains a huge amount of information about hot dogs. For this reason, try to place the relevant stuff near the beginning of the description and the blabber to the end (or just cut the latter right off). If Mike used
"Information on hot dogs, my favorite food. If you'll visit my site, called 'Mike's homepage', you'll find a huge amount of interesting stuff related to them."
as his description, he'd be better off than in the first example. He'd still have a description that is too long, but if the search engine decided to cut it, people would still see it as relevant to hot dogs from the first four words and visit. It would be even better if Mike could just lose the uninteresting stuff after the first sentence, since this would raise the weight of the phrase 'hot dogs' in his tag, earning a (very small) boost in his ranking from the search engine.
Notice that of the major search engines, Google (supplies secondary results to Yahoo's search) doesn't support the description tag.
Meta tags: The keywords tag
OK, now you've learned what the META description is about and how you can use it to your advantage. Let's move on to the next tag on our list, the keywords tag. This is what it looks like:
<META name="keywords" content="hot dogs information recipes">
The keywords tag contains words and phrases the creator of the page considers to be relevant to the document. These words can be separated by commas, spaces or both - the method of separation makes little difference. This tag is not shown to the people arriving to your site, nor do the search engines display it in their results, but many search engines do read the keywords tag and give a slight boost to the page's ranking for the words that are mentioned in it.
Generally, you should only include words and phrases that are mentioned on your page and you shouldn't use any word more than three times in your keywords tag. The optimal size for this tag is around 10 words or less, as you do not want to dilute your important keywords and phrases with obscure words. All of the words you put in your keywords tag should be relevant to the document; don't add "mp3" to your keywords if your article about endangered wolves just happens to mention that you listened to a mp3 while creating the page.
Previously, in the stone age of search engines (1998 or so), the keywords tag was a very important part of a successful search engine optimization effort. Nowadays, its effect has been reduced by the appearance more sophisticated search engine algorithms. I'd still use this tag on my pages, but I wouldn't fuss too much about it - a good META keywords tag can give you a small boost in many engines, but its weight is minimal compared to other page elements.
As you have seen from the above, creating the META keywords and the META description tag is relatively easy. However, if you for some reason do not want to do it by hand, this utility will create meta tags for you. Remember to check out the "Keyword optimization" article before creating your META tags in order figure out what to put in them.
Meta tags: The robots tag
The third tag we will cover is the META robots tag. It, just like the keywords tag, is never shown to the human visitors. The META robots tag is a simple instruction to any search engine spiders on how to treat the page. It looks like this:
<META name="robots" content="parameters">
The word 'parameters' should be replaced with commands to the spider. The available commands are INDEX and FOLLOW, and their negative counterparts, NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW. The INDEX statement instructs the spider to add the page to the search engine's index and the FOLLOW statement encourages the spider to follow any links it finds on the page. As you might have guessed, the NOINDEX tells the spider not to add the page to the index and the NOFOLLOW instructs the spider not to follow any links on the page.
Although most spiders automatically assume that any pages they come across can be indexed and links from them can be followed, it might be a good idea to add a robots tag with the index and follow statements just in case:
<META name="robots" content="index, follow">
However, like the META keywords tag, this is nothing to get all worked up about - you'll usually do fine without a robots tag, it's just a safety measure. As you have noticed from the above, the robots tag can also be used to prevent the indexing of a page. However, when doing so, remember that not all spiders support the META robots tag; you should also add a robots.txt file that forbids the spider to index the page to be on the safe side.
Meta tags: The infamous refresh tag
The last tag we'll cover is the META refresh tag, used to automatically redirect visitors from one page to another. It looks something like this:
<META HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT="1; URL=http://www.apromotionguide.com/">
It's not one of the useful META tags, but its not among the useless ones either. It's one of the few potentially dangerous tags there is. While it works quite nicely, many search engines dislike it because it is (or was) commonly used with doorway pages. I recommend that for the sake of your search engine success, leave this tag alone and instead redirect visitors by giving them a link to click. JavaScript redirects (preferably in external JS files) can also be used, although with some caution.
Meta keywords tag generator
This generator creates a meta keywords tag automatically for you. Simply enter the address of your page to the Internet address field and click Create tag. Then, cut the ready-made tag from the text box and place it between your <head> and </head> tags. All done!
Read the article about meta tags for more information on how they work. To create the other meta tags, please check out this meta tag generator.
Internet address
eg. http://www.example.com/
http://
Address not found!
Create Tag
Clear Fields
Here are your META tag codes.
Cut 'n paste them to the HEAD section of your HTML document.
(http://www.apromotionguide.com/metagenerator/index.php)
PPC search engine advertising
As it is sometimes difficult or almost impossible to achieve a top position in the search engines for certain keywords, one often ends up thinking "isn't there an easier way to do this?". Well, of course there is, but it isn't free.
If you don't want to hire a professional to optimize your site for you, you can always submit your site to a PPC search engine that sells the top positions instead of selecting them with a complex algorithm. Overture is a good example of a PPC (pay-per-click) engine and it might be the best of the bunch.
Their system is relatively simple: You select a keyword and decide how much you are willing to pay for each visitor that visits your site through the search results. The more money you can cough up, the higher you will rank on the result list. The only limitation is that your site must be at least vaguely relevant to the keyword you want to bid on.
Making the most out of your money
The cost of the top position depends greatly upon the keyword you are bidding for. For example, the #1 ranking for "ecommerce" at Overture currently costs around $3 per click. At the same time, you could get the #1 position for "certified ecommerce consultant" for a mere 5 cents per click. The latter does not produce as much traffic as the former, but it is a whole lot cheaper. And if you have the time and energy to bid on a bunch of these low-traffic keywords, the combined traffic from them will add up to the level produced by a popular keyword - but at a fraction of the cost.
There are two additional benefits in bidding for the less popular terms. One, the traffic you will receive is targeted better and should result in a better clicks-per-sale rate. Two, Overture has many partners that display the top three results from Overture in their search results. It is hard to grab one of the top three places in popular keywords and still be able to make a profit, but with slightly less competitive keywords, you can get into the top three with a reasonable price and thus have your site displayed on all of the Overture partner sites as well. To find these keywords, I would recommend that you use Overture's own tool for finding keywords.
Does this mean that you should forget the keywords that already have some people bidding for them? Absolutely not. You should bid on every keyword relevant to your site, but at the same time, you have to make sure that you will be making a profit after paying for the traffic. I recommend that you start out slowly with Overture. Investigate how much an average visitor is worth to you and then bid accordingly; the key is not to get carried away. It is better to rank 38th, get a few visitors each day and make a small profit than to rank 1st, get masses of traffic and lose money! If you feel that you aren't getting enough traffic, try to correct the situation by bidding on more keywords, not by increasing your bids so much that you won't be able to turn a profit.
Don't pay any more than you have to
When dealing with Overture or any other PPC search engine, it is also important to remember that other bidders are constantly changing their bids. If you can devote the time, checking your listings once in a while and changing your bids to suit the current situation can save you a lot of money, especially if you are bidding for terms that get searched a lot.
For example, I often see situations where the top bid is $1.20 and the second highest bid is $0.75. The guy that is bidding $1.20 in such a situation must be loaded with money, since he could achieve the same ranking with a mere $0.76 per click. I know, 44 cents isn't a lot of money, but if dozens or even hundreds of people click on the listing each day, it adds up pretty fast.
Also, remember that Overture has a minimum monthly spend of $20. If you purchase click-throughs for less than $20 on a given month, your account will be charged $20 for that month. Make sure that you're bidding on enough keywords to produce at least $20 in click-throughs per month in order to avoid paying for nothing.
My experiences with Overture have been mostly positive, and other people I've talked to seem to agree. The only negative thing about Overture is that they have become very popular among siteowners, causing the price for a top position in certain keywords to rise. Still, even at the current prices, they (in my opinion) beat the hell out of banner advertising.
However, Overture isn't the only PPC search engine out there. Searchhound, Ah-ha and FindWhat all offer similar PPC advertising programs. I have not used them so I cannot comment on their quality, but I'll be testing them in the coming months.
Search engine submission
Search engines are one of the most important ways to gain traffic. Altavista, Google, FAST, Lycos and many others receive more hits than you and I can ever even dream to. By submitting to them, you'll be able to capture a small part of the huge audience that uses search engines every day.
This article explains the search engine submission process in detail. Read the other articles in this section for instructions on how to prepare your pages for the submission.
Where to submit and how?
Before submitting, you must of course find a place to submit to. I would recommend that you focus your search engine submission efforts to the top search engines, as they are capable of providing you with serious traffic. It is my experience that these big engines provide the most visitors compared to the time spent on optimizing the pages and submitting them.
This doesn't mean that you should completely ignore the smaller engines that aren't mentioned in that article, but it does mean that you should focus on the big ones. If you can rank well in just one or two of the major search engines, the traffic you'll receive will in most cases surpass that of 20 minor engines put together.
I've handled this matter by hand-submitting to the big engines and by using a search engine submission tool such as Selfpromotion to submit to the smaller engines. Submitting to them via an automated tool is in my opinion a cost-effective move in terms of traffic received/time spent, but after that I just forget about the smaller search engines. I don't monitor my rankings in them and neither do I try to optimize my pages to please their algorithms, as I feel that the time required in order to do so is better spent on further studying the major engines.
My relationship with the big engines is completely different from the one I have with the small ones. After I've submitted, I keep an eye on my rankings in the big engines and try to continuously tweak my pages so that they would appear closer to the top in the search results. If I lose a good ranking under an important keyword, I can immediately notice the change in the amount of visitors I receive.
Thus, with the major engines, the game doesn't stop when your search engine submission process is complete - that's when it starts! You can gain traffic just by submitting your pages to all of the engines and then forgetting about them, but it is nothing compared to what you can achieve if you optimize your pages and continuously change them to match any changes in the algorithm.
Submitting all pages vs. submitting just one page
A question that is often asked in the Usenet newsgroups and various discussion forums is "Should I submit just one of my pages, or all of them?". The answer to that question is: It depends on where you're submitting to. If you're submitting to website directories, you should usually only submit your home page and nothing else. But if your are targeting the search engines and as you're reading this, you probably are, the answer is: Submit all of your pages.
In the good old days, you could just submit your home page and the search engines would follow the links on that page & automatically register the rest of the pages on your site. However, things have changed and you now have to submit all of the pages you want to have included in the search engine's index. As having more pages in the database increases the chances of your site coming up, the only way to succeed is to grab a cup of coffee and start feeding the pages to the search engines one by one... Google and FAST are positive exceptions to this rule, as they still follow links aggressively. If you're submitting to these two, it's usually enough to only register your home page with both of them as they will automatically follow the links on it and index the other pages.
When you're submitting the individual pages to different engines, try to register a maximum of five per day per engine. You probably won't get hurt if you exceed that number, but as submitting very large numbers of pages in the course of one day might give your site unwanted attention or cause the search engine to drop some of your submissions, it is better to just stick with the '5 per day per engine' rule, unless your site is really big.
I've submitted, how do I know my pages are there?
Search for them. You can usually find your pages by entering "URL:yourpageslocationhere" (w/o the quotes) into the search field, sometimes just "yourpageslocationhere" is enough. Some engines don't support these methods, but offer a Power Search/Advanced Search feature that allows you to look for pages located in a specific domain.
If you can't find your pages, it might be that they are not included in the index. If that is the situation, don't panic. It always takes the search engine a while to index content after it has been submitted, so be patient. Don't resubmit the pages unless it has been about three weeks since you submitted and you still can't find them in the database.
In some cases, the pages have not been indexed because their design or filetype is incompatible with the search engine. If you fear that this might be the case, read "Website optimization" from this site.
When should I resubmit to search engines?
When there's a need to do so. Some people say that you should resubmit every two weeks or every month. I say to you - don't listen to them. Resubmitting just for the sake of doing it does usually more harm than good. Some search engines appear to slightly prefer older pages over brand new pages, so by resubmitting when you really have no need to do so, you're wasting your time and perhaps even damaging your ranking.
You should only resubmit if:
The page has disappeared from the database or never appeared there in the first place.
Your rankings have dropped/are low and you have made some changes to the page that you think will boost your ranking. In this case, it is recommended that you resubmit in order to make the search engine 'see' the changes you've made.
Don't be afraid of resubmitting your pages if you have to, but don't do it just because it's possible.
Search engine optimization
Because search engine optimization is a very broad subject, it is impossible to cover all of it in just one article. That is why the search engine related information at A Promotion Guide has been divided into multiple articles, each of which discuss one aspect of search engine optimization.
While this solution has many benefits, it also causes problems. It makes it easy to get lost in the details and fail to see the big picture. In short, there's the danger of not being able to see the forest from the trees.
The purpose of this article is to collect all the theoretical information on this site and turn it into practical suggestions. I'll attempt to list most of the various factors that determine the ranking of a page in search engines and estimate their importance or weight.
Rather than giving engine-specific advice, this article will outline a strategy that should work fairly well with all of them. Optimizing your site with this kind of "middle ground" approach is a good choice, especially if you aren't an experienced SEO.
On-page criteria
First, let's look at how the content of your page affects its ranking. Since you control the appearance of your pages, influencing the factors listed below is relatively easy. Due to that fact, page content only has a limited role in most algorithms. Yes, it is important, but reaching the top without paying attention to off-page criteria as well is extremely hard.
Page title
Currently, the title is probably the most significant part of your page as far as search engines are concerned. No search engine optimization process is complete until you've added your keyword to the <TITLE> tag.
Usually it is best to place the keyword phrase to the beginning of the title. Short titles containing around 3-6 words seem to be generally preferred by search engines. In longer titles, the keyword easily gets lost in the "noise", which causes the ranking of the page to drop.
If you're going for a two or three-word phrase, try to keep it together for maximum effectiveness. "Search engine optimization by Joe" beats "Joe is a search engine expert and optimization guru", if your keyword phrase is "search engine optimization".
It's not just for robots
The most challenging part is creating a title that is visitor-friendly and keyword rich at the same time. Not only is the title seen by those who visit the page, but it is also clearly displayed when the page appears in the search results.
Titles that are simply collections of keywords in bizarre order can get you to the top of the search results. However, they also tend to keep people from clicking your listing. It's hard, but try to strike a balance between search engines and humans to get the best results.
Headings
<H1> and <H2> headings also carry a lot of weight. While often ignored, they're a very effective search engine optimization tool. Their largest drawback is their large size, which makes it difficult to use a <H1> heading on some pages.
CSS can be used to reduce the size of headings, but only with great care. Extreme measures, such as the use of { display: none }, may get you banned.
Generally, I attempt to create headings that contain only the most vital keyword(s) and nothing else. This isn't always easy, as the heading must also make sense to those who read the page. Simply stuffing keywords inside the tag in random order is not going to cut it.
Body text
A well-optimized title and a good heading won't do much, unless the page also contains some keyword-rich body text. Preferably, your document should contain several occurrences of the keyword.
As many search engines place more weight to words found at the top of the page, so it's also very important that your keyword appears there. Again, you'll also need to make your writing seem natural. Nobody wants to read a page that is just one big list of keywords.
Using the keyword in bold, italics, underlined or in outgoing link text can also provide a minor boost. However, because it influences the readability of the document, be careful with this one as well.
Some body text optimization tricks
Just like with the title and heading, keeping long keyword phrases together in your body text is a must. However, if you can't do so, splitting the phrase up is better than not using it at all.
What about the number of keywords in body text? How often should you repeat it? If you're aiming at a 2-word keyphrase, start at somewhere around 1-3 instances per 100 words of text. Note that the 100-word figure includes all very commonly used words (I, he, what and so on).
META tags
The importance of meta tags has dwindled so much that many search engine optimization experts have completely stopped using them. Google completely ignores meta tags and other search engines don't place much weight on them either.
While the keyword tag is beginning to become fairly useless, the description tag isn't entirely dead yet. It still enables you to control the descriptions of your pages in FAST, Teoma and some other engines. Use it and strive to write an inspiring description that draws people to your pages.
Remember to read the Meta tags article for more information on the description and keyword tags.
Off-page criteria
Today, a large part of search engine optimization work involves manipulating off-page criteria. It is perhaps somewhat harder than influencing on-page criteria, but still far from impossible.
The number one rule of improving your off-page criteria is to have a great site. Good sites attract more links, which boosts their link popularity. They also have an advantage in search engines that use click popularity, because users are likely to spend more time on a site that isn't half-bad.
Link popularity
Here's some straight talk for you: Without good link popularity, your pages will never be able to compete under popular keywords. Having plenty of sites to point to your pages is extremely important for your ranking, especially in Google.
Yes, it's possible to compensate for a lack of links to a degree. Use all of the search engine optimization tricks listed above and you'll probably be able to beat pages that have more link popularity but are badly optimized. However, when your competitor has 6,000 on-topic links and you have six, no amount of optimization is going to make you pass him in the search results.
Thus, you'll need to build links in every way you can think of. Exchange reciprocal links, encourage your visitors to link to you, write newsletter articles and so on. Just try to make sure that when someone links to a page on your site, the link text includes your most important keyword. One more reason to include keywords in the headings and titles of your pages.
For more information about this subject, simply read my article about link popularity.
Click popularity
Safe to say, click popularity isn't nearly as crucial as link popularity. It has some weight in some engines, but isn't really a major factor in most of them. My general recommendation is to ignore click popularity at the moment and focus your search engine optimization efforts on other areas for now.
Still, click popularity is an interesting thing and learning the basics about it is a good idea. Search engine algorithms change all the time, so who knows if one day Google starts using click popularity in its algorithm..
Search engine themes
The concept of themes was first brought up by Brett Tabke, webmaster of Search Engine World and a search engine optimization expert, in an article discussing search engine themes published in his newsletter. He claimed that search engines are now widely using "themes" as a key part of their ranking system, and that adapting them is an important aspect of search engine optimization.
What exactly does this theme stuff mean? The answer is pretty simple. The common, traditional point of view is that search engines rank pages separately. The theme thinking is that search engines have now begun to rank sites instead of pages, that they combine all the pages in a single site into one big "page". This would mean that optimizing a single page for a single keyword would no longer cut it - you'd have to optimize your whole site instead of just that one page.
To optimize your site for themes, you'll need to weed out content that is not related to your site's main subject. If you have a site about pets, but there's also some pages about Formula 1 driving on the site, you'll need to move the F1 pages elsewhere so that the SE's recognize your site as being highly relevant to the keyword "pets" (and other pet-related keywords) and that the F1 pages don't confuse the ranking system. You'll also need to make sure that your most important keywords appear not just in one highly optimized page, but in all of the pages on your site, in all of your META tags, in your content and often in your headings and titles.
Does this stuff really work? I'm not sure. Brett seems to be serious about this, and he should know what he's talking about when it comes to promotion. Also, some other people have also reportedly been successful by converting their sites into "theme-based". Because of these reports, I decided to try a little experiment of my own.
I added a H2 tag at the top of each page and used CSS to reduce the size of the tags. Each H2 tag was identical, short (ab. four words) and contained the keyword I was hitting at in the beginning of the tag. I had the keyword in every title of every page (the page titles were partly similar to each other, but not completely). I made sure that the keyword appeared in most of the META tags on my pages and at least once or twice in nearly every article. I also used the keyword in the link text of just about every page. The site used in the experiment had around 30 pages, every page was submitted to the engines and verified that it did indeed get into the database.
That, I figured, was the way I should nail the theme algorithm. So I went ahead, submitted and.. got killed. I focused my search engine optimization experiment on Altavista and Google. On Altavista, I did not see any positive effect at all, but since AV has recently been pretty unfriendly towards me, I didn't lose much. On Google, not only did I fail to see any positive results, but I lost some nice rankings that were delivering pretty good traffic. To sum it all up, this experiment left a bad taste in my mouth.
Before anyone starts jumping to any conclusions, I'm not saying Brett and everyone else is wrong and I'm right. I'm saying that my tests failed to show any positive results with the approach I used. My testings weren't very extensive, and it is possible that I misunderstood what Brett was trying to say, or that I just overdid it with the H2's. It's also possible that the engines have dropped or greatly altered their 'theme'-algorithms since Brett first reported about it in the summer. I wish the results of this experiment would have been different, but I feel that I have to 'call 'em as I see 'em', even if I don't like what I see.
But even as the experiment failed, I do think that the principal thinking behind 'themes' is sound, and might well be something that will gain weight in search engine algorithms in the future.
So, my recommendation about the subject would be: If you're going to convert your site into theme-based, don't just jump in head first. Do some experiments, and if you decide to use the 'theme'-approach, don't risk everything on it: In addition to using the theme-approach, optimize every page well for a different keyword.
If there's anyone out there with good or bad experience with themes, comments about my experiment, or just some general thoughts about this subject, I'd be more than happy to receive them.
Top search engines
There are thousands of search engines out there, but only a small fraction of them are likely to send you more than a couple of visitors each month. That is why instead of running around and desperately trying to submit to as many search engines as possible, you should focus on the ones that can have a strong impact on the overall traffic of your site.
In this article, I'm planning to list the four top search engines. They are in a rough order of importance based on my estimate on how many referrals a high ranking in each of them produces.
Because our intention is to only list search engines that offer free submission, it was necessary to set some limitations:
Directories have been excluded, because we've already covered the three most popular ones (ODP, Yahoo, Looksmart) elsewhere on this site.
The same goes for PPC (pay per click) and other non-free search engines. PPC advertising is a complicated subject, so I feel that it is better to discuss it separately. Those interested can read "PPC search engine advertising", my article about the topic.
There are several major search engines that do not have their own databases. For example, MSN draws all of its results from Looksmart and Inktomi. While it is a large search engine, it is impossible to submit to it directly, which is why MSN is not present in this list. The same goes for other "non-independent" search engines, such as AOL.
Before mentioning any names, let me remind you that time moves fast on the Internet. Just a few years ago, Infoseek was one of the top search engines, but now it is gone. On the other hand, back then no one had heard about Google, which is currently the undisputed champion. Things change fast, so if you want to stay current, visit this page every six months or so to check for updates.
The top dog - Google
After looking at my referral logs and reading discussion forums frequented by search engine optimization experts, it is clear to me that Google is the primary source of search engine traffic for most sites. This should not surprise anyone, because in addition to the fact that Google provides the secondary results at Yahoo, the engine itself has become the favorite of great many people due to the high quality of its results.
To make things even better, it is in my opinion relatively easy to get well-ranked in Google even under fairly competitive keywords. All these things together constitute a good reason why you should examine Google's ranking algorithm and ensure that your pages meet its requirements.
Submit to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html .
Runner up - FAST
While it's still relatively small when compared with Google, FAST shows promise of becoming a very serious contender. It provides search results for many large portals and sites, for example to Lycos. FAST also runs its own search service, AllTheWeb, which provides fairly accurate results and sports a non-cluttered interface.
Interestingly, FAST's algorithm seems to somewhat resemble that of Google, which explains why some searches turn up similar answers at both engines. However, there are differences, so a page that is in the top ten at Google may not do so well with FAST.
Submit to FAST at http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php .
Third place - Inktomi
Inktomi does not run a search engine, but does provide search services and software for other sites. Its largest clients are AOL and MSN, but many smaller search engines and portals use Inktomi's results as well.
Most of Inktomi's customers use it as a secondary results provider. This means that Ink's results are only shown when the primary provider, such as Looksmart in the case of MSN, doesn't come up with anything useful. Thus, Inktomi can provide only a limited amount of visibility to the sites listed in it, especially under keywords that are very popular. Those who are interested in getting traffic through Inktomi should therefore target keyphrases that are less common, but are used in searches every now and then.
Submit to Inktomi at http://www.goo.ne.jp/help/door/url.html .
Note: The above link takes you to Goo via Altavista's Babelfish, which translates the submit page from Japanese to English. The "Submit" button is on the left, the button on the right clears the forms.
My apologies for the clumsiness of this arrangement, but Goo is at the moment probably the best way to submit to Inktomi's database for free.
Fourth - Altavista
During its glory days in 1999 and early 2000, being able to obtain a few top ten positions at Altavista was every webmaster's dream. However, after that the engine has been constantly declining. According to recent Jupiter Media Metrix statistics, Altavista has now lost two thirds of the audience it had in the summer of 2000 when its popularity peaked.
At the moment, I would still advise that you submit all of your pages to Altavista. But while it still is able to send a visitor or two your way, you should only try optimizing your site for Altavista if you're sure that the changes won't cause your position to drop in the other top search engines.
Submit to AV at http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/new .
Summing it all up
There's no denying it, right now Google is where most of the free search engine traffic is at. Make sure that all of your pages are present in all of the above engines, but concentrate on optimizing for Google.
Some of you might be surprised by the shortness of this list, as it only includes four search engines. It's true that the list is short, but that is because we've seen a lot of free search engines disappear during the recent times.
At the moment, there unfortunately aren't any more free search engines that are worth submitting to in addition to those listed above. However, it's possible that the list may grow longer in the future as new players appear on the scene.
Website optimization
When you're building a new website or completely renovating an old one, it's important to create your design in a search engine friendly way. The choices you make are going to be with you for a long time and errors will be very time-consuming to repair at a later stage.
In other parts of this site, we've looked at how to make individual pages rank well. Now, let's focus on website optimization and examine your site as a whole. We'll go over the design techniques and principles that the search engines like, but we'll also take a brief glimpse at some potential pitfalls. Welcome aboard, I hope you enjoy the trip!
Use as much text as possible
When the World Wide Web was born in the early 1990's, it was mainly a text-based medium. Sounds, images and complex animations were either very rare or completely unheard of. Not surprisingly, the first major search engines that came around a couple years later were built to classify and rank WWW pages largely based on textual content. After all, the WWW consisted of text and would continue to do so for the foreseeable future, right?
Towards the late 1990's, the web had started to change. Although the role of text was still very important, it was now common for web pages to contain large images, Flash animations and other bells and whistles. However, due to numerous technical difficulties, the search engines were unable to widen their reach beyond the world of text. While search engines that specifically search for images have been created, general-purpose engines still mostly ignore everything that is not in text.
The moral of the story is, unless your pages are built to contain a lot of text, they're unlikely to do well in most search engines. This doesn't mean that you should drop all the images from your website, but keep in mind that as far as the search engines are concerned, images, Flash animation and sounds do not exist.
Keep non-HTML code in external files
Many of today's sites use JavaScript, CSS, or both in their designs. Some of them have quite a lot of code in these languages on each of their pages and have placed it above the HTML containing the text used on the page. In terms of website optimization, this is a bad idea.
First of all, it forces the spider to wade through something that it is not at all interested in before being able to read the text. While modern spiders are probably quite well-accustomed to such unfriendly pages, it's safe to say that filling your pages with non-HTML code is more likely to hurt than to help you.
Second, the less the search engine knows what kind of CSS and JavaScript you use, the better. If your code is attached to the HTML, search engine spiders can freely read and analyze it if they want to. On the other hand, if you place your code in external files and use a robots.txt file to forbid search engines from downloading them, your code is fairly secure. Of course the search engines could still get it if they wanted to, but then they would have to both disobey your robots.txt and grab the .css or .js file, both things that they're unlikely to do.
But why would you want to keep your CSS and JavaScript away from the eyes of the search engines if you're not doing anything wrong? Well, the problem is that search engines define what is acceptable and what is not, and it often seems like they have a lot of trouble making up their minds. For example, using a JavaScript redirect is occasionally "OK, if you have a legitimate reason for doing it" and occasionally "spamming, and we'll skin you from head to toe if we catch you". The point is that it's better to be safe than sorry, because the rules change all the time.
Frames or tables - or CSS?
The layout of your website and the way it is created is another factor that can either boost or reduce your search engine success. Here at the APG site, I've decided to use a table-based layout, which is usually considered something both human visitors and search engines can appreciate. However, it is not the only method available and all of them have their pro's and con's.
Tables
Search engines generally don't have any trouble reading a table-based page, provided that the layout is not overly complex or incorrectly designed. The only serious problem arises if you wish to have a navigation menu on the left side of the screen, just like I do. Placing the menu on the left causes its contents to be displayed above the rest of the content on the page in your source code. Humans won't mind about that, but because search engines read your source code rather than what you see on the screen, this kind of arrangement may damage your ranking in them.
You see, most search engines consider the text at the very top of the page to be more important than the one at the middle. This sounds a bit odd, but it's actually a very reasonable assumption. Take a look at some of the pages on this site for example; if you begin reading from the top, it won't take long before you've got a general idea about the contents of the page. But if you start from the middle, it will take on average substantially longer to determine what subject is being discussed.
So, if your menu pushes the actual content of your page downwards in your source code, the search engine will have difficulty determining what your page is about, which might cause your ranking to drop. However, fortunately there is a solution to this problem that allows you to use tables, keep your menu on the left and please the search engines at the same time. If you plan to use tables, I recommend using the table trick.
Frames
Some like them, some hate them. Think of them what you will, but generally frames are not as search engine friendly as tables. That is not to say that its impossible to build a site that uses frames and does well in the engines, it is just harder to do than with tables.
If you already have a site that uses frames, or if you just are determined to use them, it would be a good idea to implement a few website optimization tricks to prevent some of the most common problems.
To begin with, use a <NOFRAMES> tag on your frameset page. In it, have a simplified version (less graphics, no Flash, no JavaScripts etc.) of the content page your frameset points to and links to all of your other content pages. By having a good NOFRAMES tag, you'll make it easier for the search engines that can't read framesets to index your pages. As an added bonus, the NOFRAMES tag enables those who are using browsers that can't read frames to access your site.
However, there's another serious problem caused by frames that can't be solved with the NOFRAMES tag. Usually, a typical design that uses frames has the site navigation in one frame and the content in another. After submitting your content pages to the search engines, they will eventually be indexed and hopefully start receiving visitors. The trouble is that when someone arrives directly to one of the content pages, the navigation frame will not load. This can deter visitors from venturing further to your site and thus reduce the usefulness of the traffic sent to you by the search engines.
While this is a difficult situation, there are things you can do to correct it. The simplest of them is to install the following JavaScript to all of your content pages:
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
<!--
if (top == self) location.replace("FILENAME OF YOUR FRAMESET PAGE");
-->
</script>
As long as you remember to place the name of your frameset page into the script, you can get it to work simply by cut 'n pasting it to between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags in your HTML. However, as mentioned above, it would be best to spend some extra time and place the script in an external file instead.
So, what will the script do? Quite simply, it'll check whether the frameset is loaded and if not, it will load it. This will give the visitors who arrive directly to your content pages the opportunity to see your navigation menu and thus browse your site. Sounds great, right?
Unfortunately, the script is not as good as it seems. If you point it to your entry frameset page, you'll notice that while it loads the navigation, it will also load your homepage. You've given the visitor a possibility to navigate your site, but in turn, you're redirecting him to a page that might be completely different from the one he found in the search engine. This is in my opinion better than doing nothing, but it is still a very unsatisfactory solution.
Luckily, there are some more refined ways of handling the issue with JavaScript. They'll require a bit more effort and skill, but can deliver both the navigation menu and the correct page to the user at the same time. While these scripts have their own problems, such as not being 100% valid HTML code, they're far superior to any other solutions I've seen. So, if you're using frames and want to offer a satisfying experience to those of your users who arrive through the search engines, using them instead of that simple script I showed you is really the way to go.
To sum it up, by implementing the above suggestions, you can create frame-based sites that get along with search engines a lot better than they would normally do. They won't be perfect, but what in this world really is?
Cascading Style Sheets
Search engine-wise, using CSS to create your layout is probably the best possible solution. In addition to being more flexible than frames and tables, CSS also gives you the possibility to easily arrange your source code. This is a helpful ability, because you can use it to ensure that the spiders always read the most important and well-optimized content on the page first without having to make changes to the layout itself.
Even though it has many excellent properties, it feels like a CSS layout is a bit ahead of its time at the moment. While it is completely possible to implement, it will cause problems with older browsers, for example with Netscape Navigator 4. CSS is likely to ultimately become the layout method of choice, but for now it is still better to stick with tables.
Avoid non-HTML filetypes
Due to the great success of Adobe's Acrobat and Microsoft's Word and Excel, many sites now make parts of their content available in files created with these programs. While this may be the fastest and easiest way to post content on the Web, it can make getting your information listed on the search engines very difficult.
Although the search engines are continuously becoming better in their task of finding and indexing information, most of them can't read .PDF (Acrobat), .DOC (Word) or .XLS (Excel) files. Google is ahead of the rest in this area, as it supports all of these filetypes. Another major player, FAST, is able to index .PDF's, but not Word or Excel documents. If you want your file to be found on the rest of the engines, you're going to have to stick with HTML.
However, it must also be noted that even plain old HTML pages may cause trouble with search engines if they are generated dynamically, for example with a CGI script. There are several good ways of taking care of these problems without having to sacrifice the flexibility of generating HTML dynamically, but it's important to be aware that they do exist.
Conclusion
In order to get your pages listed at the search engines and get them to rank well, you'll have to do more than just add META tags and get a couple of links to point to your site. By designing and constructing your site correctly, you're building a solid foundation on which is it possible to apply various optimization techniques in the future.
Changing an existing site structure to one that works better with the search engines can feel like a large task, and it often is one. However, if you're planning to make improvements, it's better to start your website optimization project as quickly as possible. Sites tend to become larger and more complex with age, so the job is unlikely to get any smaller as time passes.
Web site promotion mistakes
In my other articles, I generally try to point out different web site promotion tricks and techniques that work, or talk about different obstacles and how to overcome them. This article is a bit of an exception. It doesn't explain what to do - instead, it is about the things you should avoid doing.
I've made many of the mistakes described here myself back when I was starting out, and I know that a lot of people who are new to web site promotion make these mistakes every day. Believe me, it's better to read about common errors and learn to avoid them than to do them yourself. I learned the hard way...
Search engine mistakes
Search engines are a key part of promotion and because they are so important, there are a lot of untruthful rumours, misconceptions and outdated secrets circulating about them. Perhaps the most common one is the good old "invisible text" technique. It is pretty simple: Add some text to your page that is in the same color as the background. Include keywords to this text - the search engine sees it because search engines don't "see" background colors, but your visitors will never know it's there.
This method used to work in the stone age of search engines and you can still see some pages out there that use it. In time, search engines have gotten pretty efficient in dealing with this sort of manipulation. Getting caught while doing this can result in having your rankings dropped as a penalty, or even having your site completely banned from the engine in question. Try to avoid the "invisible text" technique if possible. If you really have to use it for one reason or another, do it with CSS. But don't come crying to me if (when) you get burned...
A similar trick is to add extremely small text, stuffed with repetitions of the keywords you're trying to target, to your page. The purpose is similar to the "invisible text" technique, to hide the keyword content from the visitors while allowing search engine spiders to see it. Of course small text isn't entirely invisible, but coupled with a suitable picture in the background, it might be almost unnoticeable. This "small text technique" is another old trick which is very risky nowadays. Using this technique is hardly worth the risk and the design problems that come with it.
Let's move on to another serious mistake commonly made by webmasters just starting out with search engine promotion. They might have heard from somewhere that certain keywords, for example those related to the adult industry or different celebrities, are really popular and get searched thousands and thousands of times each day. So even while their site is for example about 19th century firearms and has nothing to do with those things, they decide to add tens of unrelated adult words to their META tags and in the worst case, even into the actual text of their page.
When doing this, they are wishing that because the keywords are so popular, their site will be seen by many and they will get a lot of visitors. This is not a good search engine promotion method, as it will only bring them visitors that are looking for something else than what the site is about. Once the visitors realize that the site is not what they are looking for, they'll leave in a heartbeat. Believe me and only optimize your site for keywords that are relevant to your site.
Another thing to keep in mind is not to overdo it when you're optimizing your pages. Repeating your primary keyword 100 times at the top of the page will not get you the top spot on search engines, on the contrary it will hurt you and might even get you into trouble. Moderation is the key - use those keywords often, but not as every other word!
Our final search engine mistake is using the META refresh tag. The details about this tag can be found in the "Meta tags" article. Read it, and leave this tag alone.
General web site promotion mistakes
Well, I don't know if this is actually a web site promotion mistake, it might be more like a general web site building tip. Anyhow, I think it's important, so here it comes:
Do not rely on free web site hosts. They are great if your ISP doesn't offer you space and you want to create a modest homepage just to show you're on the Net, but if you're planning to build a more serious site, I'd say a domain name and a paid host is almost a must. Domains and hosting space are cheap nowadays and they are well worth the money spent on them. First of all, good paid hosts are faster and more reliable than free hosts. Second, a domain name gives your site some authority - it shows you're serious and your site is going to stay around for awhile. This is extremely important if you're trying to sell something, because you'll need to make your visitors feel comfortable to send their money to you.
Another point to consider is that it's generally easier to get a site with a domain name into search engines and directories. It is a lot harder to do that if your site is hosted on a free host. It's not impossible, but web site promotion is a tough game, there's no reason to make it any harder. So spend a few bucks here if you can - you'll get them back later, with interest.
There is one more subject to cover before we're finished. That is, wasting your money on bad submitting services. I've seen thousands of spams that scream "We'll submit your site to 15000 search engines and directories for the low price of $49.95". Don't be fooled by them. The majority of those 15000 places produce minimal traffic, as there are hardly even 150 significant global engines. I'd advise against paying for these services, unless you can test-drive them first for free and pay only if you are satisfied with the results.
Note that the above does not mean you shouldn't pay for different web site promotion services. There are promotion tools that are worth the money and people who can do wonders for your site if you hire them. However, remember to investigate before you buy. Ask other people about their experiences with the service you're considering to purchase before buying it - you might save a lot of money.
Other Methods
Banner ads
Banner ads are probably quite familiar to you if you have been on the Internet for a while. At first, they might have been able to capture your attention with their blinking animations and bright colors. But as time has passed, you've grown to completely ignore them, giving new banner ads a quick glance at best. Only on rare occasions do you click on them, and the same holds true with those of your friends who use the Internet. Given these facts, it shouldn't surprise you that the average CTR (clickthrough ratio) for banner ads is nowadays around 0.2%, meaning that on average a banner has to be shown 500 times before it gets clicked even once.
Banner ads used to be a very popular form of advertising in the past. Five years ago, in 1997, the average CTR for banner ads was as high as 2%. With today's CTR being a tenth of that and continuing to drop, there are two questions in everyone's mind. Should I forget about banner ads completely and if not, how can I get a better clickthrough ratio than what the current industry average is?
Due to the current dismal state of banner advertising, I'd recommend that you examine using different sponsored search engine listings instead of banner ads. Overture (GoTo) and Google AdWords are among the best solutions and will probably give you more bang for your buck. However, if you can create significant profit from each visitor who arrives to your site, experimenting with banner ads can produce reasonable results, just as long as you remember to start out small. Test the effectiveness of your banners in small campaigns before you spend a great deal of money on banner advertising. That way you can determine with fair accuracy whether larger investments in banners will pay off or not without risking to lose a great deal of money.
Again, remember that banners are a promotion method suitable only for online stores and similar sites that have a high profit/visitor ratio. If your site earns its revenue from affiliate programs or by selling advertising space, I'd advice you to look into other things to drive traffic to your site instead of using banners.
If you believe that your site is of the type that can benefit from banner advertising and are willing to take a shot at it, don't just jump in head first. Before making any moves, read my little survival guide below in order to make your banner ads more effective.
Increasing the CTR of banner ads
Although there isn't anything you can do to turn back time and make your audience click like it is 1996 or 1997 all over again, by making sure that your banner ads obey some basic principles you can achieve a significantly higher clickthrough ratio than you normally would.
The first thing you should do is clear one misconception out of your head. Banner ads aren't about cool design or fancy graphics. When creating their banner ad, many people focus on how good they can make it look. And that's where they are dead wrong.
Your banner's purpose is not to look good. Its only purpose is to get people to click on it, arrive to your site and complete the action you want them to, for example purchase your product or browse through your content. It doesn't matter whether they arrived through an ugly banner or a pretty banner, just as long as they arrived. Don't hesitate to use a less sophisticated design in your banner ad if it results in a better clickthrough ratio.
While understanding the above is an essential part in creating a banner ad that performs well, it alone won't get you very far. Here are some other tips that will surely come in handy:
Include a "click here" note or two in your banner ads
If you have examined the banner ads on different sites, you have probably noticed that several of them include a button that says "Click here". Why? As always, the reason is fairly simple - banner ads that contain the words "click here" get on the average clicked more than those that don't.
At first I couldn't understand why this was happening, because I've always thought that if the viewer is interested in the product advertised in the banner, he will click on it. On the other hand, if he isn't interested, no amount of click here-signs is hardly going to make him do so. Still, the including those words does raise the CTR and there must be a reason for it.
This is one of those things I'd blame on the well-known scapegoat, the television. The advertisements that run on TV don't require you to do anything else except to stare at them, while the goal of banner ads is to get the user interact (click the banner). As people have been exposed to passive forms of advertising for decades, they assume that Internet advertising is similar in nature and doesn't require any action from their part. This is where the "click here" signs kick in by letting the users know that they can and should do something instead of just watching. The result is the increased CTR observed by many advertisers who incorporate these elements in their banner designs.
Whether my thoughts are on the mark or not, one thing remains proven: Including the words "click here" in your banner does result in it getting clicked more and you should use this fact to your advantage.
Animation is your friend
Have you ever tried to read something from a web page, only to be distracted and annoyed by a blinking banner at the top of your screen? Most of us have and nearly all of those who have had it happen to them wish that they'd never see another banner that blinks or moves. But like it or not, a banner ad with action in it catches the eye better than an ad that is completely static. In this case, it is worth it to be a little annoying to get some attention.
While animation can make banner ads perform better if used correctly, it can also cause a disaster if you don't know how to use it right. Over-use of animation will increase the file size of the banner, which results in it taking a longer time to load and increases the chance that the visitor has already scrolled past your banner ad before it even appears on the screen. This of course has a very undesirable effect on your clickthrough rate, so before including any animation, make sure that it doesn't make your banner too heavy and slow to load.
Use large text that clearly spells what you are about
Many people tend to clutter their banner with pictures or their company logo. While using them is not always a bad idea, you should make sure that there's enough room left for text. Use a large font size, even if it looks less attractive than a smaller one. You'll have to get noticed and small text just doesn't stand out the way bigger text does.
In your message, get right to the point and be brief. Don't try to explain in detail what your site is about and don't cram all of your offers into one banner ad. You'll have about a sentence or two of time to persuade the viewer to click to your site. If you can't do it in that time, you'll lose the visit.
Outline the benefits
To be clicked on, the ad has to be read. But getting the user's attention is only half of the task. To get the click, the user must also have a good reason to visit your site. This creates the need to use some traditional marketing tricks in your banner. Words such as "free" and "sweepstakes" for example are known to generate a healthy response from the average Internet user, so if you are running a sweepstakes on your site or offer a product for free, it can be well worth it to mention it in your banner. It is also a well established fact that sex sells. Banners that contain a picture of a beautiful lady and a hint of sex usually perform extremely well in terms of clickthroughs.
Unfortunately, there are drawbacks in using these "power words" to boost your clickthrough ratio. If your site sells pet food, using the power of sex to draw in visitors is hardly a good idea. You would get more clicks, but at the same time you'd end up targeting the wrong audience. People would come to your site, but they wouldn't buy anything.
The same problem is present in using the words "free" and "sweepstakes", as they will draw in people who are interested in entering the sweepstakes or receiving the free product, but they might not be interested in actually buying anything. So be careful with these tricks. While they are occasionally very useful, using them can cause problems as well.
Small is beautiful
The faster your banner loads, the more time it has to attract a response. If your banner is too heavy, people won't bother to wait for it to show up and will just scroll down to see the actual contents of the page. By the time the overweight creation finally appears on the screen, it is already too late.
To prevent this situation from ever happening to you, you should always remember to optimize your banners for size, if you can do so without losing too much in image quality. It is often a good idea to also remove excess graphics or give up at least a part of that cool but heavy animation. I usually attempt to keep my banners at 5000-5500 bytes if possible. Fortunately as broadband connections keep slowly spreading, ultimately this limitation in size will be lifted. Until that day comes, your banners have to load up snappy on a 56K modem, which places pretty strict limits on their size.
A banner ad? Me? You've got to be kidding!
As users have learned to disregard banner ads, designers have strived to create banners that look less like advertisements. Blending the border between editorial content and advertising, these modern-day billboards are known as "trick banners" in the industry.
Trick banners are banners that fool the user to click on them by disguising themselves as an ordinary application window or a site navigation method. These banners can also include an animated cursor just to get the user to focus their attention on them, or they can fool the user into thinking that it is possible to use the banner without getting redirected anywhere else.
Generally, trick banner ads receive a very high clickthrough ratio when compared to normal banner ads, but their downside is that the traffic they bring can be of lower value. Let's say we have just created a banner that looks identical to a Windows application and someone clicks on the "X" at the right upper corner of the banner in order to close it. The user does not want to visit your site, he just wants to get rid of the banner, but he still gets taken to your pages. It is highly unlikely that this type of visitors who are tricked into coming to your site will stay there for a very long time.
Nevertheless, it is definitely worth it to at least experiment with using at least some trick elements in your banner ads. I wouldn't recommend trying to emulate Windows applications or placing a "Cancel" button in your banners, but using an animation of a cursor or emulating a site design element can result in a good clickthrough ratio without reducing the quality of the traffic too much.
Targeting pays off
To receive attention, your banners have to be seen by the right audience. Rather than having your banner run on random sites, try to find places that attract the type of people who might be interested about your site.
For example, a banner that advertises search engine optimization services would get a significantly higher CTR if it was placed on this site than it would if it was placed on a site that focuses on Wayne Gretzky's hockey career. Always make sure that the banner is in perfect harmony with the content of the site it is going to be displayed on, even if that means you'll have to pay slightly more for the campaign.
CTR is important, but it isn't everything
The above tips should help you to achieve a decent CTR for your banners, but as I've already mentioned, getting the visitors to come to your site isn't enough. It is fairly common to focus solely on the CTR without paying any attention to what happens after the click. That kind of thinking rarely produces results that you can brag about.
It is just as important to ensure that your visitors do what you want them to do after they've arrived than it is to make sure that they arrive in the first place. The process of converting visitors into sales is a topic that is far too broad to cover in this article, so I won't venture further into that territory. However, there is one tip I just have to give to you, because I've simply seen too many banners that go against this rule.
Direct the visitors straight to what you promised them
Have you ever seen a banner that advertises a specific product at a discount, become interested and clicked on it? Were you happy when instead of taking you straight to a page where you could find details about the product and purchase it, you were taken to the store's front page, where you could find no clues on how to order this specific product? Did you bother to search through the massive inventory just to find what you wanted, or did you just shrug your shoulders and leave?
I've had that happen to me and to tell you the truth, I'm too lazy to start searching for something I shouldn't need to search for. The store in question was having a sale handed to them on a silver platter, but they lost it just because they didn't bother to take me where they had promised to. The moral of the story is, if you promise something in your banner, deliver it to the user on the very first page he sees.
If I clicked on a banner that said "See the new McLaren Formula One racing car", I want to see that car right now! After I've seen it, I can take a look at the rest of your site, but if you don't give me what you said you would, I'll just get mad and disappear. The average Internet user has a very short attention span and is quite lazy, so do the work for him instead of forcing him to do it.
What about banner exchanges?
After reading the survival guide, perhaps you're starting to get interested in giving banner advertising a try. But it seems very expensive and you can't afford it or just plain don't like the idea of paying so much for an advertising campaign. You've hear about banner exchanges, programs where you display banner ads on your pages for free and in return, other members of the program show your banner ad on their sites. This sounds like a good idea, especially as it doesn't cost any..
Stop right there. Banner exchanges sound very useful, but they are more trouble than they are worth. For starters, several banner exchanges have a 2:1 ratio, meaning that for every 2 banner ads shown on your site, your banner gets shown once on other sites. There are programs with a 3:2 ratio out there, but if you think that makes it a good deal, read on.
The second major problem is that many exchange programs don't offer a very sophisticated targeting method. This results in your banner being displayed on sites that have very little in common with your site and leads to your banner receiving a low CTR.
But don't take my word for it, let's do a little calculating, shall we? If we assume that your site gets 10000 pageviews a day, each page shows one banner from the exchange program and the ratio is 2:1, you'll earn 5000 impressions a day. After creating a killer banner ad, you beat the industry average clickthrough rate of 0.2% and your banner receives a CTR of 1% (a very good achievement, might I add).
For displaying 10000 banner ads on your pages, you get a whopping 50 visitors to your site! If you count the amount of visitors that left your site via the banner and those who got tired of waiting for your page to load because the banner slowed down the process, you should be glad if your net result isn't negative. In the end, you displayed 10000 ads on your site and received nothing in return.
If you want to display a banner ad on your pages, get one that pays you for doing so and invest that money into various promotion methods. Forget about banner exchanges, they just aren't worth it.
Click exchange programs
Because they are simple to use and promise fast results, click exchange programs have become very popular among webmasters. While all kinds of sites participate in them, especially those that have a hard time attracting traffic with other methods seem to have embraced the idea. This means that the majority of members in most click exchange programs are trying to push the latest get rich quick-scheme, advertise MLM programs or send visitors to an online store that pays the member a commission every time a person sent by him purchases something.
Before we continue, let me explain what a click exchange program is. The concept is simple and at first, it feels like it makes a lot of sense. As you know, there are vast amounts of sites out there that have owners who believe their site isn't receiving the traffic it should be. Many of them also spend plenty of time on the web, wandering around searching information or just to have fun.
Click exchange programs attempt to merge these two things together. They form a network out of the participating sites and webmasters then surf on it. For each page visited by the participant, someone else will visit his, so the programs make it possible to get traffic just by doing what you would have done anyhow. To sum it up in one phrase, click exchange programs can be described as "If you visit my site, I'll visit yours".
Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? But does it work or is it just another dead end in the maze that is website promotion? In order to get an answer to that question, I participated in four popular click exchange programs and monitored the results. ClickThru, the Traffic Generation Network, Ezhits4u and the iLoveClicks Network all talked the talk on their front pages, but could they walk the walk?
The results:
Program Unique visitors of which actually did anything Percentage
ClickThru 170 10 5,88%
iLoveClicks 170 3 1,76%
Ezhits4u 170 2 1,18%
TGN 170 6 3,52%
Total 680 21 3,09%
Now, let's look at what is behind those numbers. The "Unique visitors" field means just what it says, it is the number of unique visitors received from the network. However, keep in mind that it does NOT mean that I had to visit 170 sites to receive 170 unique visitors, as occasionally the same person was sent to my site more than once by the network. These multiple visits were counted as one, just as long as it was the same person. Visitors from some known proxy servers have been excluded from the above statistic for this reason. I'd estimate that in order to receive 170 unique visitors, you'd have to visit 180-200 sites depending on the click exchange program you are using and on your luck.
Moving on, the "of which actually did anything" field means the number of visitors that decided to venture further to the site or bookmark it. This number measures the interest displayed by the audience towards what I was offering. A high number of such visitors compared to the total visits naturally means that the people truly wanted to learn more about my pages. A low number on the other hand is a telltale sign of the fact that they just wanted to get someone visit their own pages and left after they had spent the minimum 30 seconds staring at my front page.
The percentage field probably doesn't need much explaining, but let's briefly look at it anyhow. A percentage of one means that from 100 unique visitors sent by the network, one bothered to explore this site. A percentage of two means.. well, you get the point. If you want to compare the results produced by these programs with some other traffic generation method, you might be interested to know that around 80% of visitors that come to my site via a friendly link from a high-quality on-topic site take the time to browse through multiple pages.
While I could predict the outcome to some extent, it still disappointed me. After all, this site is a guide on how to promote your site - A Promotion Guide - and the audience consisted of webmasters that were clearly attempting to get traffic, even if it meant spending some time in front of the computer. This leads me to believe that personal sites or online stores should expect a result that is even worse.
Observations and thoughts on the audience of click exchange programs
Aside from the fact that the visitors from click exchange programs are untargeted traffic and tend to vanish in 30 seconds, what did I learn about them? By looking at my logs, I could notice that many participants seemed to be members in more than one click exchange program. It is difficult to give a good estimate on how common such behavior is, especially because the sample I have is very small, but I'd say that at least 25%, but possibly 50% or more, have a thirst for clicks that is not satisfied by one program alone.
This partially explains why the quality of visitors is so low, since people that have joined several click exchange programs usually use them all at once. Because the visitor is continuously jumping from one browser window to another instead of spending time on the sites, this renders the 30 second minimum visit required by many of these programs useless.
Whether there are any significant differences in the quality of traffic sent by different programs is hard to tell. Again, the sample is too small to say anything for sure, but ClickThru does seem to be slightly better than the others. However, it is still far from the point where I could say that participating in it could be reasonably justified.
As a conclusion based on the above data, I believe that one visitor from a good reciprocal link is equal to at least 15-80 visitors from a click exchange program. To reach 21 people who are interested about your site, you'll have to spend two hours, seven minutes and thirty seconds if you use four click exchange programs at the same time and spend an average 45 seconds on a site.
By spending five dollars on advertising your site in a PPC search engine, you would be likely to receive a similar result. Is it worth the trouble? I'll let you decide. However, if I were you, I'd stop reading this article right now and would select some other one that is about a more effective promotion tool.
Desperate attempts to improve the results
If you have been paying attention, you are well aware that my thoughts about click exchange programs are less than flattering. Still, it would be dishonest to say that it is impossible to improve the results achieved in this test. So, if I haven't been able to convince you to stop using these programs, I might as well give you some tips on how to get the most out of them.
The first thing you should do is to sign up with at least four programs. This might sound a little odd, as just a while ago I complained that people who are doing so are partly the reason why these programs are so useless. Unfortunately, it is a "tragedy of the commons" kind of thing. It would be best if everyone used only one program, but because that is not happening, you might as well maximize the amount of clicks you can get in an hour. So, there's a four program minimum in this game and to top it all off, you'll have to use them all at the same time.
In most situations, a little planning before rushing into action is a good idea and this one is not an exception. Before signing up to anything, you should create a page where you are going to direct the visitors you'll receive. Directing them to your front page is usually a waste of time, because they are in too much hurry to read long texts or appreciate your beautiful design.
The page where the traffic from click exchange programs is directed should be simple and go straight to the point. Use a very large heading to get their attention, then briefly explain why they would benefit from browsing your site or reading more about your wonderful product. You should also ensure that your creation loads up fast even on slow connections. Due to these restrictions, the result won't be very beautiful, so it probably is a good idea to ensure that only people from click exchange programs see it. Don't link to the page from other pages and use a robots.txt file to keep search engine spiders from indexing it.
The last thing to remember is that your content or offering has to have appeal to the people who use these programs. This means that sites targeted at webmasters probably perform better than others. Also, pages that have content that is both easy and fast to browse through, such as humor sites or pages that have pictures of women in swimsuits might stand a chance, even while they shouldn't expect too great results either.
Needless to say, a site that has 400 pages of scientific material about global warming would be lucky to get one in a thousand click exchange program users to do anything else than promptly go away.
Web page design
Promoting a poorly built site is much like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it with water. You'll never succeed unless you plug the holes before pouring the water in. In order for your site to 'hold water', you must succeed in creating a good, clean web page design and interesting & original content. I will not discuss web page design in depth here, because there are plenty of other sites devoted entirely to that subject in the Net. However, I thought it might be useful to include some general suggestions on how to fine-tune your design.
Despite the fact that design can heavily affect the success of a site, I'm one of those who believe that a site rises or falls depending on its content. Jakob Nielsen's Useit.com has become very popular despite the visually unattractive design he uses. Users will forgive many design issues if the content is good, but if it's bad, no design tricks can save you. Thus, we'll take a look at creating content first before moving on to the design stuff..
Good content is essential in website promotion
When you are starting to build your site, it's important to choose a topic that you are interested in and are familiar with. If your site is about something that doesn't interest you at all or you aren't really familiar with the topic, the user can usually see it and deem your site to be worthless. Besides, building a site about a topic you're not interested in will be a pain, and updating it will be even more frustrating. But if you want your site to be popular, in addition to interesting you the site must interest other people.
If your site is about yourself, or a special topic with limited interest to the vast majority of population, it isn't going to be a big hit. So explore what people are interested in, and if you happen to be interested in the same thing, try building a site about it. A good place to find out what other people are interested in is Search Engine Watch's "What people are searching"-section.
When you have decided on the topic of your site and start to write, keep in mind that spelling is an essential part of good content. Even if your thoughts are brilliant, a bunch of typos might ruin the professional look of your site. So try to use a spell checker if possible and fix any errors you find. Also make sure that the text flows naturally and is easy to read. It is annoyingly easy to write a grammatically correct text that is nearly impossible to read - forgetting to divide it into paragraphs and use sub-headings every now and then is a good way to achieve this.
Unfortunately, creating content is unlike creating a web page design in some ways. A nice design can be used for several years, but even the best content tends to get stale after a while. You have probably stumbled upon some of those funny articles that were written in 1998 and just forgotten on the web. They might have been top-notch at the time they were written, but time has degraded them into little more than a joke.
What I'm trying to say is that static content is dead content; you should try to update old articles with new information every now and then. This rule applies to most sites, but not all - a site reviewing the newest computer hardware would probably want to archive its articles for users to browse, but there would be little sense in updating the older articles at a later date.
While this process of keeping old information up to date is important, it should not prevent you from creating completely new articles. People that regularly visit your site love to see completely new stuff, so you should try to give it to them. Don't think that the building process of your site ends when you put it on the web - think that it has only just really begun.
Polishing your web page design
As stated above, I tend to focus more on content than design, but no siteowner in their right mind should completely forget the design aspect. While a bad design might not drive away your regular visitors, provided that your content is good enough, new visitors might be so 'shocked' from a poor design that they won't even take the time to actually read your articles. I'm not going to write about issues like how to choose the best colors, or how to create nice-looking graphics. Like I pointed in the beginning of this article, there are specialized sites for that purpose. But nevertheless, let's take a look at some of the basics:
The first objective is to ensure that the users can easily and quickly access your content. If possible, you should aim for the possibility to move from one page of the site to any other page on the site with one click. I have implemented this by placing links to most of the content pages on this site to the left side of every page.
Naturally, sites that have very large amounts of pages cannot use the same method, but you should at least make sure that users don't get lost on your site. It's usually very useful to have someone other than yourself test the navigation system and give their opinion about it. I've often created navigation systems that seem to work perfectly, but later noticed that I'm the only one who knows how to use them :).
If it's broken, fix it
The second objective is to correct any broken images and links. In my opinion, broken images make a site look like a house that has two broken windows and a lawn that is never mowed - either there has been nobody to take care of it for a long time, or that someone is damn lazy.
Broken links on the other hand won't damage the visual appearance of your site, but they will make using the site a pain in the ass. Broken links within your site are a very bad mistake, and you should try to do everything in your power to prevent them from appearing. One good way to do this is to try to change the filenames of your pages as rarely as possible.
You should try to constantly keep an eye on your in-site links, but especially when you have just made changes that have required you to change the filenames of your pages. For people who have access to their site's log files, this task is a bit easier - the log file shows if some page was requested from your site but was not found, usually meaning that you have a broken link somewhere on your site.
Links to outside your site get broken more easily, since you have no control over the pages of other sites. It is understandable if your site contains some broken links to out-site material, but try to correct them as soon as you are made aware of their presence. A nice method is to use an automatic link-checker to check all links on your pages for possible broken links; there are several free programs that do this out there.
A few more hints
The third objective is not to overload your pages with stuff. Many people fill their pages with blinking banner ads (often 3 or more), several different font types and sound files. Remember not to stuff too many things on one page, because not everyone has a T3 connection at home. If it takes too long for pages to load, users will not wait, they'll leave. I'm not saying you should only have plain text, but do think before you start adding more and more stuff. Sometimes less is more!
Fourth, validate your HTML code. It ensures that your site works on all browsers and platforms. Unfortunately, it will not ensure that your web page design looks good in all screen resolutions, so I suggest you test your pages in different resolutions. A page that looks extremely good in 1024x768 might be annoying to use in 800x600.
The final thing I'd like to say is: Get someone else to look at it. There are many places on the 'Net where you can find people who are willing to look at your site and comment about it for free. The Usenet newsgroup alt.html.critique is an example of a place where users may request feedback about their site, but several others exist as well. Use them to your advantage, because it's often hard to look objectively at one's own creations. I can't count the times the advice of other people has greatly helped my design work.
FFA pages
FFA pages, also known as Free For All pages, are pages that allow anyone to submit a link to them, free of cost and without having to link back to the page. Whether an FFA submission pays off or not has long been the cause of a fierce debate. Some claim that FFA pages do not produce enough traffic compared to the time spent on submitting to them and that it is better to invest your resources on search engine optimization or other promotion methods instead. Others point out that a free link is always better than nothing and that a good autosubmitter can get you pretty good results in a minimal amount of time.
In order to find out who was correct and who wasn't, I decided to run a little experiment myself. I rounded up five different FFA submission methods and put them to the test. The following tools were included:
-The Jimtools FFA submission tools
-Marcap's FFA Blaster software
-The FFA Net autosubmitter
-Worldsubmitter's FFA page submitter (now replaced with a set of links)
-Hand submission to 15 random FFA pages found at the Google search engine
Unfortunately, even before I could really begin the test, I noticed that the FFA Blaster software refused to work on my Win98 computer and kept crashing, so I removed it from the test. The others went through the full program, which means that I submitted three times to each of them, keeping three day intervals between the submissions.
All of the visitors from the different sources were sent to a simple page, which only contained the line "Please wait, transferring you to the site. If you aren't automatically transferred in a few seconds, click here.". The page contained a simple JavaScript redirect, which automatically took the visitors to the index page of my site.
I used the same information for all submissions in order to make sure that the differences between the efficiency of the tools wouldn't be caused by the wording of my description or the attractiveness of my title.
Title used: A Promotion Guide - Learn to promote your site!
Description used: Offers free website promotion advice in the form of articles and tutorials. Topics include search engines, directories and reciprocal links. (A shorter version was used, if the page required a shorter description).
Section used: Computers (if available).
After the final submission, I waited for a week and then gathered the results.
What were they like? I saw immediately that my submissions had caused a real flood... but not one of traffic. The E-mail address I had created for the purpose of conducting this experiment got buried in confirmation E-mails and other spam mail. Three weeks after the last submission I calculated that 4500 E-mail messages, mostly confirmation mailings and other spam, had been sent there.
The worst part is, such spamming will not stop after you've received one mail from every page you submitted to. Some people seem to think that if you post once to their FFA page, you're requesting to be bugged from here to eternity with their advertisements. Fortunately I used a Hotmail account that I could just throw away after I was done.
Had I used my real account, I would have had great difficulty in trying to separate the messages I want to read from the massive flood of spam. So, take my word for it - never, ever use your real E-mail address if you decide to post to FFA pages. Get a throwaway account and use it, you'll save yourself a whole lot of trouble.
So, I got spammed. But did I get any traffic from my submissions? Here are the results:
Method used Visitors -- "" -- that went past the redirect page E-mail harvesters
Jimtools FFA submission 5 1 1
FFA Net autosubmitter 26 3 12
Worldsubmitter's FFA 1 0 1
Hand submission 1 0 1
Total 33 4 15
Like poker players often say, "read 'em and weep". The number of visitors was low and compared to the time spent, it was appalling. But that wasn't the biggest problem. The most depressing thing was the quality of the visitors. For every two humans that visited my site, one E-mail harvester came to my pages looking for E-mail addresses to flood with spam.
Even more annoying was the fact that only four of the 33 visitors went past the redirect page I sent them to and of those four people, only a single person bothered to explore the site further. Of course, this was partly my fault, I should have directed the visitors to copies of my index.html page instead of using redirects. That way a few more people might have actually read some of my articles, but it wouldn't have corrected the fundamental problem.
This little experiment proved that the traffic you get from FFA's is low-value traffic. The difference between visitors from other sources is clear when I look at my logs. People that come via search engines or directories tend to stick around for a long time. Visitors from FFA's disappear very quickly without looking at many pages.
What are my conclusions? FFA pages are a waste of your time and your effort. Use your energy for something more productive - you'll find plenty of information about methods that actually work on this site. But if you for some reason or another decide to submit to FFA's, do not use your E-mail address and make sure that the page you submit doesn't contain any E-mail addresses either. One of the E-mail harvesters that visited my site was even clever enough to grab my index.html page after it noticed that the redirect page I sent it to didn't contain any E-mail addresses.
Could FFA pages, in any circumstances, produce significant traffic? The answer is yes, it might be possible. Using FFA autosubmitters doesn't work because your link rolls off from the pages too fast as other people submit their sites via the same tool. Submitting manually to FFA's doesn't work either, because it takes too much time per submission. But it just might be possible to have some success, if you could use the power of auto-submission without having your link roll of the page five minutes after you submitted it. This would require a tool that searches individual FFA pages from the Internet and submits automatically to them, making sure that you won't be submitting to the same list of pages everyone else is using. I haven't tested such software yet, but if I do so in the future, you'll be the first one to know.
As you can see, I believe that in most cases it is useless to submit to these pages. However, there are two sides to each story. In this case, there's the person who submits and the person who runs the FFA page. For the other side of this story, read my article about running a FFA links page on this site.
Increase traffic with return visitors
More often than I'd like to see, webmasters make the mistake of assuming that the easiest way to increase traffic is to attract as many new visitors as possible. This belief is partially correct, but a site cannot become truly popular unless it also appeals to these new users so much that they decide to come back again and again.
We all have a few favorite places in the web where we stop by every now and then to get the information and entertainment we need. One of your important goals as a siteowner is to make your site such a place for as many people as possible. The better you succeed in doing so, the more products you will sell and the higher your revenue from advertising will be.
Why is it important to increase return traffic?
There are many reasons why you would want your visitors to come back to your pages. If you sell banner advertising space, you can easily calculate that a person who comes to your site, looks at five pages and then returns ten times within the next year and checks out an average of two pages per visit is four times as valuable to you than one who reads five pages but forgets all about you after leaving.
Owners of online stores benefit from an increase in return traffic as well, because in many cases it takes more than one visit to make the sale. The visitor might not need your product right now, but if he bookmarks your site and uses that bookmark once in a while, he is likely to buy from you when the time is right.
Another advantage that arises from such visitor loyalty is that those who regularly visit your site often mention it to their friends, family and colleagues. This can easily create a so-called traffic virus, which is born when people tell about you to their acquaintances, who then spread the word to their own acquaintances and so on. While it might not sound like a very big deal, word-of-mouth is the primary source of traffic for many larger sites and the reason they have become what they are today.
Just when I think I'm out - they pull me back in
I'm not going to waste your time by going on and on about the value of return traffic. You know that it will benefit your site and for our purposes, that is enough. From this point onwards, we will be focusing on the most important issue - what do you need to do to get people to keep returning to your pages?
While there is no magic formula, there are many things you can do that will increase the likelihood of your users turning into regular visitors. The first and foremost step is to have a great site that is filled with high quality content. That sounds like self-evident and it is, but it is also the foundation that you will be building on. If your site is not the best thing that has come along since sliced bread, all the tricks in the world won't help you to lure your visitors into visiting it for a second time. Would you go back to a page that you found to be boring, starved of content and lacking useful information?
Even if your site is truly among the best, the harsh truth is that you will have to update it continuously if you want to retain the interest of your visitors. This means adding unique, fresh content every now and then or at the very least updating and improving the content you already offer. The more often you can do this the better, but once or twice a month is the very minimum that must be met.
If someone comes back two or three times within two months and nothing changes between these visits, he's likely to think that the site is no longer being updated and go elsewhere. On the other hand, if there is a lot of new articles to read each time, you'll probably see him come back several times more. Consider adding a "What's new" page of somesort to inform your regular visitors about recent developments and make sure that you have plenty of things to report on it.
Simply having good content and updating it often goes a long way towards establishing your site as a regular stop for many surfers. However, there are plenty of other things that can help you in your task and convert an even larger part of your visitors into regulars.
Start a newsletter
Running a newsletter takes a lot of work, but brings large rewards in return. If you are able to get your visitors to subscribe, you can then E-mail your newsletter to them without the fear of being accused of spamming. This way they won't forget that your site exists and after reading your E-mails for a while, they will remember its address even in their sleep.
Your newsletter can be a simple announcement service that lets everyone know when you have made changes to your site, have several original articles in each issue that pertain to whatever it is your site is about or be something in between these two. In any case, you should keep in mind that the more unique content your newsletter offers, the more interest it will attract. A simple announcement service is merely an extension of your site, but a high quality newsletter can become so famous that people come to your pages just to subscribe to it.
Remind people to bookmark
There are two schools of thought on this subject. The first believes that offering a link to bookmark your site will increase the amount of visitors who do so. Because remembering Internet addresses is difficult for some, being bookmarked ensures that you won't be losing return traffic just because the user happened to wander off and then forgot your URL.
The second school thinks that while it is important that your site gets added to the surfer's bookmarks or favorites, asking for someone to do so isn't very effective. The supporters of this line of thought say that if someone knows how to use bookmarks, he will also know how to add them. All you will have to do is to provide enough good stuff that will convince the visitor that adding your site to the favorites list would be a good idea.
I'm leaning towards the latter opinion, but my mind is not completely made up yet. So, it might not be a bad idea to consider adding a "Bookmark now!" link, provided that you're able to integrate it to your design so that it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. I will be running a test on this subject in the near future, so remember to stay tuned.
Add a monthly sweepstakes
Giving something valuable for free is a sure-fire way to get some extra hits. The word about sweepstakes and contests usually tends to spread well on its own, but running one will also give you the opportunity to submit to the hundreds of sites that list sweepstakes and competitions. As a result, you should see a nice increase in traffic and also get more return visitors as people come back to enter next month's sweepstakes. Sounds great, doesn't it?
Unfortunately, there's a small fly in this soup. The traffic you will receive is interested in winning the prize, not exploring your site and seeing what it has to offer. That is why I'd recommend that you choose a prize that should attract the kind of audience you want to capture instead of random sweepstake-enthusiasts.
To give an example, if my site sold gardening tools, I'd set up a contest where participants could win a set of gardening equipment and a subscription to a gardening magazine instead of offering money as a prize. There would be less visitors and less entries, but the people that would come just might buy something instead of simply entering the competition and leaving.
As said above, offering other than money as a prize is usually a good idea, but you should also prominently display the estimated value of your prize in dollars. "A set of rare comics" doesn't sound exciting, but "$395 worth of rare comics" sounds a lot better, don't you think? Whatever you do, make sure that the prize is worth winning but also one that you can afford.
Discussion forums are like glue
I'm not kidding you. A well-maintained, busy discussion forum can become a huge success. There are several sites I originally visited because of the content, but after a while the biggest reason that kept me coming back was that they had such great discussion forums.
The best part about these boards is that most of the content is produced by the visitors themselves and even moderating them can be partially transferred to the most intelligent and reliable participants. You will have to stop by every now and then to read and write messages, answer questions, remove offensive content and otherwise make sure that everything is going all right, but that isn't very hard work.
However, before you break out the champagne and start dreaming about your new automatic content generator that will draw surfers by the thousands, you'll need to hear about the negative sides. The largest problem is that your site must be popular, very popular, when you start your forum. A forum is like a nuclear reactor, it needs to achieve critical mass before it starts working on its own. If your site doesn't get enough traffic, the forum won't be frequented by many users and they will write very few new messages.
This "critical mass" can become a vicious circle, because when there aren't any new messages, users won't be tempted to come back to the forums and won't write new messages. Most message boards suffer from this syndrome in the beginning, but the operator can alleviate it by actively participating to old threads and by starting new ones. However, even that won't help if the forum just doesn't have enough traffic, so wait until your site has grown a bit before you try this trick.
Make your address easy to remember
Our last suggestion is very simple to implement and doesn't cost much, but there are many sites out there today that haven't taken up on it for one reason or another. Let's be honest, is http://www.angelfire.com/music/joeysmp3s/ or www.joeysmp3s.com easier to remember?
Domain names are cheap these days, you can get one for around ten bucks or less. If you value your site at all, and because you're reading this you probably do, get one. It will help people to remember your address and your site will also seem to be more reliable and professional than it would if you didn't have your own domain.
Reciprocal links
Reciprocal links are one of the most common and most effective forms of website promotion. The basic concept is simple - you link my site, I'll link yours and we'll both get an increase in traffic. But there is more to it than just exchanging links with a random site.
The very first problem is to find the right site to do an reciprocal link exchange with. A good partner has content that appeals to the same kind of visitors as your site does, and vice versa of course. For example, a Futurama fan site could have reciprocal links with a Simpsons fan site, a free stuff site with a sweepstakes site and so on. To create successful reciprocal links, the exchanging sites need to be similar yet different enough so that they don't compete with each other.
After you've found a site that fits the above description, there are a few other important things that need to be figured out. First, is the other site interesting? If it's filled with banner ads and typos, you're better off finding another site to exchange reciprocal links with. A good rule of thumb is "If it doesn't interest me, it's not going to interest my visitors".
The second thing is to figure out how much traffic the site gets. Usually you can make a rough estimate just by browsing the site - if it looks and feels professional, it probably gets a pretty good amount of visitors. If it feels like it was a poor site to begin with, and no one has updated it since 1997, it probably doesn't get more visitors a day than you have fingers in your hands.
For the exchange to be useful to both parties involved, sites performing an exchange should have similar amounts of traffic - that way one site doesn't just rip visitors off the other one without giving any in return. Because most webmasters know this rule (some even monitor the amount of traffic they receive/send out), it's unlikely that a low-traffic site can get a link exchange with a high-traffic one. But if your site is really good, your proposal for a link exchange could be accepted even if you get less visitors than the site you're trying to exchange with. The old "content is king"-rule applies here, too :).
After you've found a site that seems to be suitable, it's time to contact the webmaster of that site. Tell him that you run a site that has a similar topic and describe your site a bit (remember to give your front page's address). Say that you like his site and have included a link to it in your site (give him the address of the page where the link is), then ask him to return the favor by linking to your site. If you never get a reply or your proposal gets rejected, just forget it and find another site.
If you manage to make a deal and get the other webmaster to link to your site, keep your end of the bargain - don't remove your link without contacting the webmaster of the other site first. Because there are some webmasters who agree to exchange reciprocal links, add your link on their site for a few days/weeks and then remove it without noticing you, you should also check the site of your partner every now and then to see if he's keeping his part of the deal. If he is not, contact the guy and kindly ask him to explain why your link has disappeared. If you don't get a satisfactory explanation, remove the link to his site from your site and find another partner.
E-mail signatures
They are often forgotten, but E-mail signatures can prove to be a very useful website promotion tool that produces great results compared to the effort required to use it. After all, most of us send a lot of E-mails, and many end their messages with expressions like "Take care" or "See you later" followed by the writer's name. Such signatures are nice, but why settle for just one brief line with very little useful content?
Think about it for a while. People are used to handing out their business card to nearly everyone they meet, but the same people sign their E-mail messages with merely their name, if they even bother to sign them at all. Instead of just signing with your name, why not include a full-scale E-mail signature at the bottom of your messages? Since you're going to send those E-mails anyhow, it would be a very good idea to turn them into a traffic generator by using a good signature. But how can that be achieved?
Unfortunately it is hard to give detailed instructions on what to put in your E-mail signatures. Because people are different, signatures should also be different. A teenage girl promoting her site about the latest pop band would hardly want to use the same style in her signature as a middle-aged man trying to get visitors to his online computer store.
Before you create your signature, think about what kind of people you usually exchange E-mails with. Then try to figure out what these people like. Should you use "power" words in your signature, such as "FREE" or "NOW", or would you be better off with a strictly formal version that only contains the name of your site and its address?
If you are unsure about what kind of signature you should create, I would advise you to go with a more formal style instead of marketing hype. Since a signature is something that very much represents you in the eyes of everyone you exchange E-mails with, you should be careful not to spoil your reputation with a signature that the receiver might consider to be unprofessional or tactless.
Creating a good E-mail signature
So, what does a good E-mail signature consist of? In my opinion, it
Starts with a brief courtesy, such as "Sincerely" or "All the best", followed by your name. While such wishes alone won't do you much good, they do tend to give a more positive image of yourself to others. If appropriate, you can add your title into your sig as well, since it gives you a bit of authority. Everyone who has a site can rightfully call himself a "Webmaster"!
Includes a brief description of your site. It should give people the information they need to determine what your site is about and encourage them to visit it. At the same time, you don't want to try too hard. The key to good E-mail signatures lies somewhere between a simple list of contact information and a blatant advertisement.
Always remember to think from the receiver's point of view. It is darn easy to accidentally create a description that tells people why you want them to visit your site instead of telling them why they would want to visit it!
A good description is nothing unless it is followed by a link to your site. Remember to use http:// in the link, ie. http://www.apromotionguide.com/ instead of www.apromotionguide.com. This will allow many E-mail programs to identify it as a link so that users can click on it to go directly to your site instead of having to open up a browser window and cut & paste the address.
Is short. A good general rule of thumb is that your signature shouldn't exceed four lines in length. If your signature is too long, people won't take the time to read it. If your E-mail signature obeys the four line rule, you can use the same signature in Usenet and most other discussion forums as well.
Contains no spelling errors or bad grammar. In addition to that, it should also be easy on the eyes. In some cases, using upper-case in certain words might work, but generally it's a good idea to avoid SHOUTING or ThiS aNNoyiNg WRiTiNg STyLe.
OK, we have went through the theory. Now let's have a look at an example signature:
---
Sincerely,
Joe Kirkegaard, CEO of Best Computers Inc.
Best Computers - powerful hardware at a price you can afford: <site address here>
---
Why is that a good example? Because it is short and gets right to the point. At the same time, it is able to deliver accurate information about who you are, where your site is located and how the receiver might benefit from visiting it. The above signature is also an excellent example of a plain and un-aggressive "one size fits all" signature that could be used in messages sent to just about anyone. If you want to add a bit more "hype" or "action" to your signature, feel free to do so, but as I warned before, make sure that you don't overdo it.
Now that you know how to compose the perfect signature for yourself, it is time to add it to your E-mail program so that you don't have to type it again every time you send out an E-mail. How this can be done depends on the program you use, but here is a set of brief instructions on how to add E-mail signatures to some of the most popular E-mail programs.
You now have a good signature that you can use in your E-mails and in your Usenet, discussion forum and messageboard postings. As discussion forums and the Usenet are a bit different from E-mails, those who are thinking about using their signature in the above mentioned places might want to read my article called "Signature advertising in the Usenet" about the topic.
Topsites
Topsites are site lists focused around a common topic, for example clip art, pets, music etc. Sites on these lists are ranked in order of "votes" - the site that gets voted most gets the top place, the site that gets the 2nd biggest amount of votes gets the second place and so on. The voting system is simple; each topsite member places a link back to the topsite on his site and for each visitor that clicks the link, the site gets one vote.
Naturally, most of the traffic that comes into the list goes to the high ranking sites, although usually many of the lower-ranking ones also get a decent share. The biggest part of traffic coming to topsite lists usually comes from the sites on the list, but high-quality topsites normally get pretty nice traffic on their own, too. Topsite lists are a somewhat similar method as reciprocal links; the major differences are that with topsite lists, there is a "middleman" and that it's more difficult to control which sites you're exchanging traffic with.
One of the problems related to these sites is that in order for visitors to be able to "vote" for your site, you need to provide a link to the topsite, usually in the form of a picture. This might cause some difficulty; if the link picture is too big and in a too prominent place, your site will look unprofessional and ugly. If it's too small, you might risk people missing it and have trouble to get enough votes to rise on the list.
In overall, do they work? Sometimes, but not always. It pretty much depends on the quality of the topsite in question. If you decide to have a try, find one that doesn't have any pop-up windows, has a lot of sites that are very closely related to the subject of your site and has its own domain. After that, you'll just need to monitor the traffic you're sending to the list and the traffic you're getting from it. If it looks like you're continuously on the losing end, resign and find another topsite or just forget about it and use other promotion methods.
If your site is big enough to grab the first place, you're going to want to send enough visitors to claim the top, but no more. If your placement is #1 after sending 1000 visitors and #1 after sending 5000, why not stop after 1000 and replace the voting link with a paid advertisement until the topsite resets and you need to send another thousand? This can be done manually, but a CGI-script would make your life a lot easier.
To find a topsite list related to your site, look at sites dealing with the same subject as you. Some of them are probably members of one, if one exists. Search engines are also useful as always.
Build traffic with Usenet advertising
If you know how to use Usenet or other similar message forums, you might want to use your skills to build the traffic to your site. There are however some things you should take into consideration before you start sending messages about your newly created site. This page and the tips on it are mainly directed to those who want to perform some Usenet advertising, but most of the things discussed can be easily applied to other online discussion forums as well.
Before we continue, I must warn you that from now on I assume that you have a basic knowledge about how the Usenet and its newsgroups work. If you don't, you might encounter some odd words or have trouble understanding some of the information on this page. I've attempted to include links into different resources that explain some common Usenet concepts in more detail, but if you're completely new to Usenet I suggest that you visit the site linked above before you read this article. That being said, let's continue..
Usually the Usenet is seen as a some kind of a extremist anti-commercial place that has no value at all to those who are trying to build the traffic to their sites. There is a grain of truth in that view, but it is not the entire truth, far from it. Instead, usually the people who frequent Usenet forums will tolerate those who announce their personal site about their hobby, provided that it is relevant to the topic of the newsgroup.
On the other hand, if you post an advertisement about the latest MLM or affiliate program, in most newsgroups it means that you're begging to be crucified on the spot. The reaction to announcing commercial sites lies somewhere between these two. If you do it right, there's a good chance that it will provide the site with a nice amount of traffic for a while, but if you mess things up, your reputation can get badly hurt.
Why do I talk about "announcing" sites instead of Usenet advertising? It's because that is just what you should do, announce your site on the Usenet. Trying to use the Usenet newsgroups as an advertising tool and posting messages about your site every week will very quickly make you a lot of enemies. Take my word on this one and just send one message to each newsgroup, OK? If you want continued exposure to your site at Usenet, read my article about Usenet signatures and use them.
Newsgroup advertising - starting the game
The first thing you must do is to find newsgroups that are about the same topic as your site. All good programs that allow you to access the Usenet also offer the possibility to search for different newsgroups by using keywords. Make a note of the newsgroups that seem to closely match the topic of your site. You'll probably be tempted to include some less relevant groups as well, but don't. Although just about everybody watches TV, including the people at the history newsgroup, that does not make it OK to post an announcement about your online TV store there.
You now have a list of on-topic newsgroups ready. Depending on your site and on how thoroughly you searched, it might be very short, really long or somewhere between those two. If you feel that your list is too short, you might want to consider spending a few more moments searching. On the other hand, if your list is about the length of an 18-member family's grocery list, you will probably need to drop out some of the groups before you start posting. My personal opinion is that anything over five is way too much and risky. I believe that around three is usually the number you should shoot for. If there are more than five newsgroups in your list, it would be a good idea to reduce that number to five or less. But which groups you should toss away and which groups should you keep on your list?
The first criteria is of course relevance. If there are any newsgroups where your site doesn't fit in perfectly left on your list, exclude them. This should remove a few groups, but if it isn't enough, drop out some of the low-traffic groups. It is impossible to tell exactly just how much readers a newsgroup has, but you can make an educated guess by looking at the number of messages written there each day. If there are a lot of messages posted to the group, it is very likely that there are also plenty of people who read them. Drop out the groups that get a minimal amount of posts (one in a week or less) and check your list again. If it still seems to include too many newsgroups, sort them in the order of traffic they receive and take out the ones with least traffic until you're satisfied with the result.
So, after dropping some groups or perhaps adding them, you have a list in front of you that you feel isn't too long or too short. You have successfully selected the newsgroups that look promising and you can now move forward to the next step..
Preparing your advertisement and posting it
Now its time to move in and examine closer the groups you have selected. Before actually posting anything, it is wise to read the group for a while and see how the group reacts when people post announcements similar to the one you're going to make. If everyone who announces a site gets flamed and accused of being a spammer, it might be wise to forget posting to that group or at least plan well how to defend yourself against such accusations. You should also read the group FAQ if one is available and look whether it has any rules about making such announcements.
If the users of the group seem to react favorably to announcements of new sites and the FAQ doesn't say that such postings are forbidden, you can mark that group as "clear to post". After you've evaluated all the groups on your list, it's finally time to start writing your messages. Although aggressive ads and marketing hype have their place, Usenet is not that place. Don't create and send a blatant advertisement unless you want to attract unwanted attention from Usenet veterans. What you want to do is to create an image of someone who is somewhat new to Usenet and who happens to be so excited about his site that he just had to type a brief message about it. You do not want to appear as a professional advertiser or someone who just popped in to promote his site.
Indeed, the right way to advertise at Usenet is not to advertise. Instead, you should ask for feedback about your site. Let's look at an example of such a posting:
Hello everyone!
After three months of hard work, my site about how to build traffic is finally up and running. I have tried to create a site that goes right to the point and cuts through all of the marketing and PR hype. Having read this group for quite a while, it looks like there are a lot of knowledgeable people here, so I'd love to get some feedback about my site if anyone can spare the time. The site is located at http://www.apromotionguide.com/ and called "A Promotion Guide".
Most of the articles discuss different aspects of search engines and website directories, for example how to get into Yahoo and what kind of effects link popularity has on your search engine ranking. I think that some of the articles are quite good, but I'm not so satisfied with others, so I'd be grateful if you could tell me which articles you liked and which ones you didn't - and why?
Thanks in advance,
Lauri Harpf, Webmaster of A Promotion Guide
Learn to promote your site NOW: http://www.apromotionguide.com/
That's what I consider to be a good way to announce your site on the Usenet. What you're doing is asking for feedback, but at the same time you are making sure that everyone notices the existence of your site and gets a good idea of what your site is about.
But why ask for feedback? Why not just say "hey, my site is out there, it has great information about topic X/sells product Y for a really great price, come and visit me"?
Yeah, you could do that, but then it would be clear to everyone that the only reason you wrote your message was to get more traffic to your site. If that happens, people are far more likely to react negatively to your posting and it is possible that you'll get some pretty hostile answers to your post. In the worst case scenario some very aggressive person might even complain to your host or ISP about your announcement. This is something you should try to avoid at all cost and by sending a message like the one above instead of a straightforward advertisement, you're less likely to receive negative comments about your post. It is also possible that you will get what you ask for and someone will provide a good suggestion or two that can help you in making your site even better.
If you are going to send your message into several newsgroups, you're going to have to face a difficult question: Are you going to crosspost or not? Normally when you are sending the same message into multiple groups it is considered polite to crosspost it. In this case that might not be such a smart move after all.
If you crosspost, everyone reading the message can see that you've sent your message into several places and they might start to think that your message is an advertisement after all. If you send the message into all of the groups on your list without crossposting it (ie. you multi-post), you have one advantage - people can't see that you have sent the message into other newsgroups, unless they actually read them. Both methods have their ups and downs, but for making announcements such as the one you're going to make, I'd recommend multi-posting.
After you have posted..
The most important thing to do after posting your announcement, advertisement or request for feedback is to stick around and see whether replies are made to your message. Should someone post a reply and give you positive feedback about your site or offer some helpful suggestions, answer to him, thank him for his time and implement the suggestions if you find them to be useful.
If you get accused of spamming the group or receive other negative feedback, don't let yourself be dragged into a flamewar. Instead, reply and politely tell that you thought your posting was OK and on-topic and if it wasn't, you're sorry. Say that you were just too excited about your new site not to post something about it and that you aren't going to post any more messages about your site to the group.
Some of you might wonder why they should be polite if someone insults them. In most situations, I'm for the "an eye for an eye" policy, but you should handle this one differently. If you are able to keep your cool and defend your position without resorting to name-calling, your reputation won't be tarnished. Think about it, would you buy something from a store owner who shouts rude words to another guy in the middle of the street? You wouldn't? Then you probably wouldn't buy anything from a E-merchant that gets involved in flamewars on the Usenet. Don't get angry and don't leave the group if you get attacked- be polite, but make it clear that you weren't doing anything wrong by posting.
If you've made it this far without skipping over some parts, let me congratulate you. You are now ready to build some traffic from the Usenet. Don't let yourself be scared by all of the warnings and instructions included here: I've done it, and it really isn't as hard as it might feel like after reading this article. Good luck with your Usenet advertising and remember, just one message per group!
Winning website awards
Website awards are small, sometimes animated pictures that have a little bit of text and some cute graphics in them. They are a bit like trophies from sport events - one would easily believe that they have no actual purpose and are just designed to look good and to make the owner proud of himself.
Is it that simple? Well, if it were you wouldn't have to read this article. Website awards actually have a function, but the way they work is not quite common knowledge. Even many webmasters who display awards on their sites don't have a clue on what is actually happening.
Let's start by looking at this topic from the award winner's side. What does he actually get? Well, first of all he receives the graphic that the award distributor has made. Only on rare occasions it has any value; unless the site that gave it is extremely known and respected, the graphic alone will not raise the prestige of the winning page.
Second, the winner usually receives a link from the site that gave the award. The value of this link depends on where it is placed and how much traffic the linking page gets. If it's a prominent link on a busy site, it's worth something. If it's a tiny link on a low-traffic site, it won't do the winner much good.
Alright, we've pretty much covered what the winner gets. But does the person who gives out awards get anything, or is he left empty handed? Sometimes it is better to give than to receive, and I feel that this is one of the cases where the rule applies.
If done right, giving out awards can be a good promotion method, as it has two major positive effects. First, it creates a link popularity boost as it is possible and even common to pass out cut 'n paste HTML-code along with the award itself. This code is then used to install the award to the winner's site and to link it back to the site that gave the award. Most award winners seem to comply with this linking procedure without giving it a second thought.
This boost in link popularity helps the person that gave the award in appearing near the top in search engines, especially if he is wise enough to give the awards mostly to sites that deal with similar topics as his own site. The relevancy of the links is important due to search engine algorithms - read the link popularity article for more information.
Distributing awards also creates some visitors through the awards visible on the winner's websites. Sure, not many people click on an award, but if you give out 1000 of them and every one gets clicked just twice a month, that's 2000 visitors/month for the site right there!
Who's really winning?
In conclusion, the person giving out awards usually benefits more from them than the one winning the award. If you're planning to apply for awards, prefer big sites that offer a prominent link on their site for winners. If you want, you might also try to win smaller awards just to gain some links. I wouldn't even think about placing the actual awards on my site; the real prize is the link that can be gained from the site that gives the award, not the award itself.
On the other hand, if you're planning to hand out website awards, it might be a good idea. There are plenty of webmasters out there who haven't read this article and will gladly accept just about any award, place it on their site and link it to your site.
The only thing you'll need is graphic skills to make the award picture and a set of linking instructions to pass out to the "lucky" winners. It might be wise to limit the sites that can apply for the award to the ones with a similar topic as your site so that you will gain a lot of relevant, not random, links that will help you in your search engine related promotion efforts.
To find awards you can win (keep my advice in mind and don't be fooled by the pretty award pictures), visit Award sites and Website awards. If you're giving out an award of your own, you may also submit it to those sites in order to drive more award-hungry people to your site.
Increase website traffic with articles
Quite frankly, it's hard to quickly increase website traffic. When you submit a site to a search engine or a directory, it takes a while before it gets listed and the effects start to show. However, if you happen to be a webmaster of a new site, you know that it is difficult to wait for the traffic to start growing. There's nothing that would sound better than receiving a few hundred or thousand visitors within the next day or two, but how are you going to make that happen?
While there are many possible solutions, the best way to increase website traffic for a brief period of time is to write newsletter articles. All that is required is an idea, decent writing skills, a couple hours of time and someone who would be interested in publishing your work. Because there is no money involved, this promotion technique is especially suited for small business owners who don't have a large marketing budget.
The resource box is the key
Newsletter editors are always looking for good content. Especially when their newsletter is published daily or weekly, it's hard for them to produce all the content they need on their own. However, while they admit that they need the content, most of them can't afford or simply don't want to pay for it.
Because too many people aren't willing to write articles without any compensation, someone invented a clever arrangement: In exchange for allowing his content to be published for free, the author is allowed to place one small advertisement in the newsletter without charge. These advertisements are placed immediately below the article and are called "resource boxes" or "bylines". A typical resource box contains some information about the author and a link to his site. To give an example, here's one of my own:
----------------------------------------------------------------
Lauri Harpf runs the A Promotion Guide website, where he
offers free information on how to increase website traffic by
using search engines and directories. His site can be found at
http://www.apromotionguide.com/
----------------------------------------------------------------
But is there any point in writing a full article just to get one 4-6 line ad? There probably wouldn't, if you were limited to publishing it in just one newsletter. However, usually you'll only give newsletters a right to use your article instead of transferring its ownership. This makes it possible to write a single piece and then have it published by several ezines. A good article may be featured in more than ten newsletters, thus allowing your 4-6 line ad reach tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers and increase your website traffic substantially.
As this one ad is the only compensation you'll get from your article, it has to be a good one. No matter how good your articles are, they won't produce too much traffic if your resource box is unattractive. To improve the effectiveness of your resource box, make sure that it
Mentions the address of your website, preferably in the form http://www.mysite.com/. Unlike simply using your domain name "mysite.com", the longer "http://www.mysite.com/" allows users of Outlook Express and several other E-mail programs to click on the link rather than forcing them to open a new browser window and cut & paste the address.
Doesn't have any affiliate URL's, ie. http://www.affiliateprogram.com/index.htm?affiliate_id=affiliate . The people who have been on the net for a while generally tend to avoid clicking at long URL's that look like affiliate links. If you really want to use such a link, create a page, for example "program.html" on your site that is nothing more than a JavaScript redirect to the affiliate program's address. Then simply use http://www.mysite.com/program.html in your resource box.
Has been tested. If you write often for the same newsletters, it wouldn't be a bad idea to create several different resource boxes and compare their performance. Well-planned resource box testing enables you to get as many clickthroughs from your articles as possible.
Some marketing required
When you decide to start writing articles, the first step is to find as many newsletters as possible that are dedicated to the topic you want to write about. There are several methods you can use to accomplish this. Start out by visiting the leading sites about your topic and see whether some of them publish newsletters. Then use the search engines and ezine directories to find more of them.
While searching for newsletters that might be willing to publish your article is not much fun, it's a very important job. Try to find 10-20 medium/large newsletters and absolutely refuse to quit until you have done so. The reason why this is vital for your success is that most of the work involved in this promotion method comes from writing the article itself. Once that is done, sending the article to a hundred editors instead of five will not take much more time, but it will explode the amount of visitors you'll receive.
After you've found enough newsletters that accept articles from readers, arrange them into a list based on how many subscribers they have. Many newsletters publish the current number of subscribers in each issue, but if some of them don't, try to make an educated guess based on how professional they seem.
When you're done, send the article to the first newsletter on your list, then wait a couple of days for their response before moving on to the next one. Granted, it would be easier to simply send your article to every newsletter at the same time, but it isn't wise for two reasons:
Large newsletters tend to only accept articles that haven't already been widely published, while most smaller ones are not as picky.
If you'd send your article to everyone simultaneously, two or more large ezines might publish it at the same time. This makes the editors of said ezines look bad, which in turn can result in them forwarding your next article submission straight to the trashcan.
When you've sent to your article to all of the newsletters/ezines on your lists, it's beginning to approach the end of its lifespan. The last step is to send it to various lists and sites that distribute free articles, where it can be picked up by owners of smaller ezines that you don't know about. There are a large amount of these lists, but a few of the most important ones that accept nearly all sorts of articles are
Article Announce:
http://www.web-source.net/articlesub.htm
IdeaMarketers:
http://www.ideamarketers.com/
Publisher Network:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/publisher_network
Does it increase my traffic enough to pay off?
It's hard to answer this question, because everything depends on how good your article is and how well you are able to market it. In the best possible scenario your article will be published by several ezines that have 100,000+ subscribers each, resulting in >5000 visitors to your site. On the flip side of the coin, it's possible that nobody will publish your article and you won't get a single hit. My personal experience is that a reasonably well-written article that is actively marketed usually produces around 500-2500 unique visitors.
If you decide to try your hand at writing articles, remember that the results tend to improve as you become more experienced. Should your first pieces be rejected by most newsletters and only produce a handful of visitors, don't get depressed. It takes a bit of practice, but it is worth it in the long run.
OK, so it works - how do I do it?
Writing newsletter articles isn't the easiest job in the world, but it isn't the hardest either. However, if you don't have any past experience, it might be difficult to get started. For that reason, I chose to write two articles about this subject instead of just one.
In the piece you just read, "Increase website traffic with articles", we discussed how to market your articles and what kind of results you can expect. The other article, "Writing newsletter articles" has a few pointers on how to create the articles themselves. So, if you haven't written anything before, consider taking a look at it as well for maximum benefit.
Links & Resources
Button Maker
http://www.apromotionguide.com/bm/
Button Maker is a utility for creating customized buttons for websites. You are free to make a button that suits your liking and then use it on your site in any way you choose. The service is free of charge.
This tool uses Javascript and CSS, so both should be enabled in your browser for a satisfying experience. For error reports and comments, please contact me. If you are reporting an error, please include a detailed description of it in your message.
The backgrounds and some of the fonts used by Button Maker are courtesy of grsites.com. Other fonts are provided by Divide by zero. The nice color pick-JavaScript is the work of Matt Kruse.
Dealing with your spam problem
E-mail is a great way to communicate. Fast, cheap and very effective, it has become a major part of the modern world, both in recreational and business use. Yet, there is a cloud on the horizon.
Nearly 70% of the E-mails sent this month (June 2004) were spam, or in other words, unsolicited commercial bulk E-mail. The growth in unwanted E-mail marketing is astounding, as we can notice by looking backwards a bit. In late 2003, spam accounted for 55% of E-mail traffic and in 2002, only a miniscule portion, 2.3% out of all E-mail messages, was spam.
Spam has increased up to a point where it is reducing the value of E-mail as a communication tool. Many are forced to switch E-mail addresses, discontinue publishing their E-mail among the other contact information on web pages and most annoying of all, sort through billions of offers for a cheap m0rt.gag3 or for pills that (supposedly would) make their private parts grow disproportionately.
I'm one of those people. For a while now, I've been receiving so much spam that sorting through my E-mail has become a real pain. That is, until one day when I finally figured out that there must be a better way to do this. Immediately, I did some research and not surprisingly, found several methods that took my Inbox away from the control of spammers and gave it back to me.
If you're also getting more spam than you'd like to, then please take a peak at these couple of tips on what you can do about it. They might not eliminate your spam problem completely, but I guarantee that they will make it much less disturbing.
1. Get proper filtering software
A good E-mail filter has, in my opinion, two qualities. First, it is reasonably easy to install and to use. Second, it is based on adaptive filtering that learns which messages you consider to be spam and which to be useful. Filters that work based on certain keywords, such as "v.i.a.g.r.a" or "mortgage" are too easily fooled and too prone to classifying good E-mail as spam and vice a versa.
Of course, there are many alternatives available, but my personal choice is SpamBayes. Not only does it fill the above requirements, but it is also completely free of charge. SpamBayes needs a couple of weeks of training to become really effective, but after that, it sorts your mail for you with an astounding accuracy.
(A word of warning, though: At the time of writing, SpamBayes suffers from a very annoying bug that occasionally corrupts its training database, forcing you to retrain it to weed out spam from your legitimate E-mail. I recommend that you read their FAQ section concerning this issue and use pickle storage from the get-go)
2. Obfuscate your E-mail address
Should you run a web site like I do, I highly recommend that you take some special measures when displaying your E-mail address. One of the most common ways for spammers to find their victims is to use special software to scan the World Wide Web for E-mail addresses. These addresses are then stored into a database and bombarded with spam.
You can prevent yourself from getting into dozens of E-mail databases, if you use methods that present your E-mail address in a way that allows humans to contact you easily, but makes it hard for spam-bots to get a hold of your E-mail.
There are several web sites dedicated to this matter, but to give an example, one good one is Tim Williams' site. It contains many methods, from simple to complicated, that can be used to hide your E-mail address. My favorite, the HTML encoding method, seems to be sufficient for now - but for more security, you might be tempted to go with the JavaScript techniques.
Those interested in using JavaScript to hide their E-mail address are also recommended to read this excellent article about the subject from Webmarks. The detailed explanations and screenshots give a good idea on how JavaScript can protect your E-mail address.
To go a bit further, it might be wise to do a Google search using your own E-mail address. This way, you can find out if any sites are displaying your E-mail in un-encoded form and allowing spammers to pluck it like a ripe cherry. Should that be happening, you would perhaps want to contact the owner of the web site and ask him to remove your address or encode it.
3. Turn off your preview feature
E-mail addresses are valuable to spammers, but their value rises even higher when it becomes clear that spam sent to the address is being read. Several people who send bulk e-mail use HTML and include links to images in their advertisements. These links often lead to an unique address in a server that is controlled by the spammer, allowing him to deduct who has read his advertisement by looking at which URL's were used to request the image.
Simply put, whenever you open a spam, you're telling the spammer that his junk is getting through. To prevent that, you need to either disable HTML E-mail completely, or as I prefer to, switch off the preview feature that many E-mail programs have and only open those E-mails that surely are not spam. If you're unsure on how to turn off the previewing of messages, here are some instructions for Outlook and Outlook Express.
4. Use your brains
When you do get spam, never respond to it or attempt to remove yourself from the list. The E-mail will either go to an address that is not in use or to someone who has nothing to do with the spam and has just been 'framed' to look like he is the original author.
In a worst-case scenario, your request will reach the spammer, merely notifying him that your address is functional. If they would really respect your privacy enough to remove you upon your request, they probably wouldn't be bothering you without your permission in the first place, right?
Of course, under any conditions, do not request more information, do not click on any links and for heaven's sake, do not buy whatever it is they are attempting to sell you. The same product is available out there in the real world, just with better quality and at a more affordable price. If you really have erection problems, go to a doctor instead of buying vitamin B badged as Viagra from some shady guy off the Internet.
Free website content
Need some content for your website, but just don't feel like writing? Or perhaps you just like my work and would like to display an article I've written on your site? No matter what the reason is, this page contains some free website content that you can use.
You are free to publish the content listed below on your website. You may also use the articles in your newsletter or ezine, provided that your newsletter is based on the opt-in principle. However, there are some conditions that you must agree to should you decide to use these articles:
You will be granted a non-exclusive right to publish and use the content without charge. At the same time, you agree that I'll retain the copyright of the content.
You agree to use the content in its entirety, without modifying it in any way. Should you need to edit the content to shorten it, please contact me to ask for a permission to do so.
If you're using the content on your website or in a HTML-formatted newsletter, you must make the link in the resource box clickable.
You agree only to use the content listed on this page. You may not publish content available elsewhere on this site.
If the above sounds fair to you, feel free to grab as many of these articles as you like:
Building Printer Friendly Pages
You design for screens, but do you also design for printers? Learn to make your website more printer friendly with CSS.
824 words, resource box included.
HTML version - Text version
Why Pop-Ups are Pop-Bad
To boost their advertising revenues, many large sites have installed pop-ups. Should you do the same?
810 words, resource box included.
HTML version - Text version
Keeping Your Pop-Ups - and Your Audience
If you decide to use pop-ups on your website, take these steps to avoid driving your visitors away.
700 words, resource box included.
HTML version - Text version
Building an E-mail Address Database
Gathering a large opt-in E-mail database isn't easy, but it has its rewards. This article contains some suggestions on how to collect E-mail addresses from your visitors.
755 words, resource box included.
HTML version - Text version
What Killed the Banner Ad?
The click-through rates of banners have been declining for a long time. What are the reasons behind the decline and how can you make your banners more effective?
820 words, resource box included.
HTML version - Text version
Using SSI's to Ease Site Maintenance
Server Side Includes can make your website easier to update and maintain. Learn the basics from this article.
849 words, resource box included.
HTML version - Text version
Advanced 404 Pages
Custom 404 pages are great, but they do cause one uncomfortable side-effect. This article provides the instructions on how to install a CGI script that fixes the problem.
1329 words, resource box included.
HTML version - Text version
Use 404 Pages to Your Advantage
Encountering 404 (Not Found) error pages can make your users disappear faster than lighting. The problem can be alleviated by installing a custom 404 error page.
743 words, resource box included.
HTML version - Text version
HTML Compressor
http://www.apromotionguide.com/compressor/
HTML Compressor compresses HTML files without loss of information. For more details, please read the FAQ.
HTML Compressor FAQ
How do I use the HTML Compressor?
Usage is easy. Simply enter the address of the page you want to compress, for example http://www.mydomain.com/mypage.html, into the page field. Then click on Compress or press enter.
Note that the page you wish to compress has to reside on a domain and be accessible from the Internet. HTML Compressor does not currently allow you to compress pages that are located on your computer.
After you've clicked on Compress, the tool fetches the HTML page from the address you have provided. It attempts to reduce the size of the file by using multiple different techniques (see "What does this tool actually do?").
Once the compression is complete the results will be displayed to you in a box similar to the one below:
Under "Page:", you will see a link to the compressed version of the page you provided. Right-click on this link and save the compressed page to your hard drive; then upload it to your web server, replacing the uncompressed version. Do note: As the compressed HTML is extremely hard to read, be sure to keep a readable version of your page somewhere safe.
Below "Original size:" and "Compressed size:" you will see the size of the page (in bytes) before and after the compression took place. This helps you estimate how much weight your page has shed in the process. Under "Ratio:", you'll see how the compressed page's size compares to that of the original page. A small percentage indicates good compression, while a high one suggests that the size did not drop much.
In default operating mode, HTML Compressor uses all possible optimizations. However, you can customize the operation of the tool by clicking on the "config" link, surrounded by a red box in the image below:
What does this tool actually do?
In brief, it removes all of the unnecessary characters from a HTML page. HTML Compressor does not affect the visual appearance of your page or its contents. It just compacts all the tags and other markup information into a space that is as small as possible.
This tool, like all other HTML-applications, assumes that your HTML is valid. Unfortunately, most HTML documents on the Internet do not adhere to the standards. Thus, provisions have been made to ensure that the HTML Compressor also works with HTML that is less-than-perfect. Nevertheless, it is recommended that you validate your HTML before using the compressor.
Unlike some other HTML compressors, this tool does not create errors to your HTML document. In other words, if your file was valid before the compression, it will stay that way.
So, what about the details? Let's take a look at the configuration screen:
Remove comments: When this option is checked, the program will remove all HTML comments from the file. The strings <!-- and --> are removed, as well as everything between them. Comments within <pre>, <script> and <style> tags are not removed by this option.
Remove unnecessary tags: When enabled, the HTML Compressor removes tags that are optional according to the HTML specification. For example, many end tags are not required as the next start tag implies the end of the previous element.
Remove unnecessary spaces: Multiple spaces are treated as a single space in HTML, meaning that " " is seen as " ". Unnecessary spaces add to the size of your HTML file without contributing to the layout of your page.
Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. Multiple non-breaking spaces ( ) are not collapsed into one space, and text inside a <pre> tag is displayed as-is, without collapsing whitespace. For these reasons, HTML Compressor does not tamper with non-breaking spaces or text that is within a <pre> tag. Whitespace within <script> and <style> tags is also preserved.
Replace tags with shorter ones: Replaces all occurrences <strike> tag with <s>, a shorter tag with the same meaning. No other tags are replaced, as there are no shorter versions of other tags. For example, <strong> and <b> may look similar, but their meaning is different.
Remove unnecessary quotes: Strips out all quotes that are not required by the HTML standard. The function takes into account that some attribute values must be quoted and others don't. For example, quotes must be preserved in <BODY bgcolor="#FFFFFF">, but they can be stripped from <IMG src="myimage.png" height="77" width="23">.
Remove newlines: When checked, the program removes all newlines (line changes) from the page, effectively turning the page into one really long line of text. What do you mean it's harder to read now? Newlines are not removed from text within <pre>, <script> or <style> tags.
Remove HTML comments inside <SCRIPT> and <STYLE> tags: Does just that, strips out HTML comments within these tags. Note that "Remove comments" does no such thing - this option needs to be checked.
People often add HTML comments to their <SCRIPT> tags to prevent older browsers from mistakenly displaying the contents of the <SCRIPT> tag. There really is no need to do that anymore, as no browser that understands HTML 3.2 requires such a safety measure. HTML 3.2 was introduced way back in 1997, so no harm should be caused by removing these comments.
How effective is HTML Compressor?
The answer depends on the HTML file you feed it. A file with many tags and little text tends to compress well, while one with plenty of text and very few tags doesn't. Typically the compression ranges between 80-95%, so the file size drops 5-20%.
HTML Compressor should be the most effective tool for compressing your HTML, but if you find a program that crunches your HTML into an even smaller size, let me know about it.
Why should I compress my HTML?
Why shouldn't you compress your HTML? Compressing it means saving bandwidth and reducing the load time of your page. The more hits your page gets, the more important this becomes. Besides, wouldn't it be great to be able to brag to your friends that yours is the smallest?
Back to HTML Compressor
How can I send feedback?
Simply contact me via this online form. I'm happy to receive any suggestions or comments you might have.
More promotion tips and tricks
In this section you can find our collection of useful links. Included are discussion forums, search engines and various other good resources & tools.
For those who wish to learn even more promotion tips and tricks, the "Promotion Sites" category contains links to several of the world's leading sites about website promotion and search engine optimization. Enjoy!
Search Engines
(http://www.apromotionguide.com/selinks.html)
Links to all the important (and less important) search engines and directories.
Promotion Sites
(http://www.apromotionguide.com/promotionsites.html)
Here you can find more sites dedicated to website promotion, search engine optimization and other related subjects.
Utilities and Newsletters
(http://www.apromotionguide.com/utilities.html)
Various helpful utilities and newsletters related to search engine optimization and website promotion.
Promotion Forums
(http://www.apromotionguide.com/promoforums.html)
If you want to exchange thoughts with some of the best promotion experts out there, take a look at these discussion forums.
Personal Links
(http://www.apromotionguide.com/pelinks.html)
A few non-promotion related links to sites I find worth visiting.
7 Essential Steps to Web Site Promotion
Web Site promotion should be the major part of your web site marketing plan. It's not enough just to design a beautiful web site and put in on the Net. Promoting your web site has to be done constantly if you want to get a continuous stream of traffic to it. If you don't drive traffic to your web site, your online business venture will soon fail.
1. Create a web site marketing plan - if you fail to plan then you default to a plan for failure. When designing your web site, create a plan on how to market it as well. Try to put yourself in your customers shoes when doing this. It's too easy to just view your web site from your own perspective. You need to have a clear vision for your business, goals (short and long term) you wish to achieve and the strategies of how you will accomplish them.
2. Define your target market - many online marketers promote their web site aimlessly in a field which is too large i.e. they may use bulk mailing as one of their promotion strategies. Of course you may get some visitors but the chances are you will not make many sales. Why? You have not narrowed your field of customers and targeted them. If you sold Cadillacs online for instance, you are not randomly going to market to every person on the Net. Your target market may be previous owners of cadillacs, or people who routinely purchase luxury American cars.
Getting targeted customers to your web site, will increase sales, because they will have more interest in your product or service than marketing to a general audience.
3. Use several promotion strategies - don't just stick to one form of promotion because you never know which one will work the best for you. If you use many channels i.e. search engines, email marketing, forums, writing articles etc you have a greater chance of getting more traffic to your web site.
4. Promote continuously - if you want to drive constant traffic to your web site, you must promote it continuously. Web traffic is the lifeblood of your online business. For example, you could constantly optimize your web pages for the search engines, resubmit them if needed, visit discussion forums every day and write an article for online publications every two weeks.
5. Calculate your return on investment (ROI) - this means keeping track of how much money you invested in your marketing plan and what profit you received in return. This will avoid wasting large sums of money thrown aimlessly into advertising.
If you calculate it takes 100 visitors to your web site to generate one sale and with each sale you make $10, then you shouldn't spend more than 10 cents to get each targeted visitor and still make a profit.
In order to know which aspects of your marketing campaign bring the most visitors, you must be able to monitor visitor activity to your web pages.
6. Analyze your web site traffic - by analyzing your web site traffic, you can determine what marketing strategies are successful. You can then change them as necessary, to boost the sales or services from your site.
Your analysis may include what keywords your visitors are using to find your web site, which web pages are the most popular and where your visitors are coming from. These are essential statistics you should know, instead of blindly promoting your web site and hoping for the best.
7. Test, monitor and track your results - to run an effective online marketing campaign, you need to constantly test what works and what doesn't. Tracking the response to an ad may cause you to refine it until it generates a great return on the money you invested. Once your results are satisfactory, you can then roll out your ads on a larger scale and spend greater sums of money.
You should also monitor your site in the search engines, so you can optimize your web pages for higher search engine rankings. This will attract more visitors which leads to higher profits.
Web site promotion strategies will differ for everyone, and will depend a lot on your product, web site and your personality. Try everything you can, record the results, and see what works for you.
17 Highly Effective Strategies to Increase Search Engine Rankings
Search engines are still one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your web site. This is because it is highly targeted traffic. A person searching for a particular phrase on a search engine, gets taken to your web site.
It makes sense then, to make your site as attractive as possible to the search engines, so your rankings will improve, giving you more visitors which leads to more sales - your ultimate goal.
Here are 17 powerful strategies you should implement, to substantially increase search engine traffic:
1. Keyword Density -
the ratio of keywords on your visible page to non-keywords is called Keyword Density. i.e. if you have 100 words on your page and 3 of those words are "boat" or "boats", then you will get a keyword density of 3% of your text for the word "boat".
Try to aim for a keyword density on your site from 3-20%. This will give you a good range. You can analyze your keyword density by using these online tools:
http://www.KeywordDensity.com http://www.KeywordCount.com
2. Keywords in your domain name -
try to incorporate one of your keywords or a keyword phrase in your domain name. i.e. http://www.isitebuild.com (building web sites) or http://www.ihost-websites.com (hosting web sites). This may also help people to memorize your name when they are looking for this service.
3. Page Title -
write a short descriptive title of 5-8 words for your web site, containing your primary keywords or keyword phrase.
The page title is the first thing that people see when your site appears in the search engines. Begin your title with a capital letter, then follow with lower-case letters. This makes it easier to read than titles with all words capitalized. Place your most important keyword phrase toward the beginning of your title tag.
4. Description Meta Tag -
some search engines will include this below your title. Choose 20 of your most important keywords and write a 200-250 character sentence about your site. Don't repeat your title description but write a different one with different keywords. Some search engines will just take this description meta tag, some will use both the title and description tags.
5. Keywords Meta Tag -
research 50-100 keywords people would insert in the search engines to find your site. A great tool for doing this is the keyword suggestion tool or Wordtracker. Refine this list to your 20 best keywords or keyword phrases.
Leave out the commas between your keywords, so the search engines can group the words into any phrases that seem appropriate. This positions your words for minimum space with maximum combinations.
6. Header tags -
search engines tend to place emphasis on the header tags so make sure you have your H1 tag at the top of your web page. Use CSS (cascading style sheets) to avoid the problem of your text appearing too large when just using html for this tag.
Use the other header tags (H2, H3, H4) throughout your web copy.
7. Comment Tags -
these are mostly used by web designers to remind them of how to structure web pages. Write a sentence using some of your most important keywords, place it in a comment tag and insert the comment tag in your body copy.
8. Use the ALT Tag for Images -
some people surf the Web with the graphics turned off. Placing ALT tags in the html code for your images enables them to see the description of that image.
Incorporate keywords in the alt tag of your images. WARNING: Make sure the words relate to the graphic, otherwise you could get banned for "keyword stuffing".
9. Image File Names -
change your image file names to your keywords.
10. Page Link Names -
place a primary keyword in your page link names. Rather than using a link in your navigation bar like "services", add a keyword to that page link. If you offer web hosting services, it could be "webhostingservices.htm"
Also use keywords in the page links throughout your copy. Instead of writing a paragraph about your testimonials and linking to a page labeled "testimonials", create a link to a page called "marketing successes".
11. Create a Site Map -
create a site map that contains links to all the sections of your site. Write a description for each section. Place this site map on your homepage as some search engines will only index the homepage and not deeper pages in your site.
12. Quality Content -
provide web copy of 250 to 300 words which are targeted for your web site visitors. Sprinkle your most important keywords throughout your text, particularly in the first paragraph. Be careful not to overstuff keywords in your copy so that it sounds strange when you read it. Get some others to review and edit your pages before you submit them for the world to read.
13. Repair Broken Links -
most search engine directories will not list your site if it has broken links. Also visitors get frustrated when they reach a broken link page (404 error page) and will click elsewhere. Make sure you do a link check before your site goes live http://www.AnyBrowser.com
14. Create a contact page -
the search engine directory, Yahoo will not index your page if you don't have a real address (don't use a Post Office Address).
15. Reciprocal Links -
search engines (especially Google) place high relevancy on links to your site in assigning a good ranking.
Create a links page that includes links to sites with similar content. Make sure they don't compete with your site and that they are quality links. Preferably, find sites that already have a high search engine ranking.
Ask sites that link to your competition to link to your site. To find out which sites are linking to your competition, visit a search engine and enter "link:" before your competitors URL. For example: link:mysite.com or link:www.mysite.com
16. Cross linking multiple sites -
if you have multiple sites, cross link all your sites and include a description on your web site for each link.
17. Keep your file size small -
if you use dynamic html (i.e. javascript, DHTML) it will often push your web copy (containing your keywords) to the bottom of your page. Since search engines read the text that is near the top of your page, that nice piece of javascript you have placed before your web copy, will affect your search engine rankings.
You can keep your file size small by storing your JavaScript and CSS code in an external file.
Conclusion:
Create a simple, clean design for your web site that is easily navigable. Focus on good quality content with well-written, keyword rich copy, based on how it will benefit the visitor.
Implement the powerful strategies outlined above and the traffic to your web site will increase dramatically.
