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Once you have a web site you'll want everyone to go and look at it. But how do they
know it's there? Clearly you can put your web site address (the domain name you just
bought) on your stationery, your advertising, your shop front or van perhaps. In time
people will remember your domain name just as they remember your street address and will
tend to go to your site to look up products, prices, even basic information such as opening
times. But a web site is a whole new advertising medium and should be capable of
bringing you new customers on it's own.
Search Engines
A search engine is a web site backed by software to search for particular subjects on the
internet. If you want to find a cobbler in Cobham you might go to
www.google.co.uk and type in
cobblers. Google will list all the sites it knows about containing that word.
It's that simple!
The problem is that the world wide web is just that, world wide, and there
will be hundreds of thousands of such sites - most of which make only passing reference to cobblers
and have more to do with Northampton Football Club or food than shoe repairs! The UK version
of Google lets you limit your search to UK based sites but this will still give you tens of thousands
of results. Many internet users will try to limit their search further by using very specific
words and including place names: entering cobbler cobham will list only a few hundred sites.
You might search for shoe repairs or shoe repairer instead to eliminate Northampton FC and
the various food sites.
Ranking
The search problem, from your point of view, is to make sure that your site contains the words that
people will use to find organisations such as yours. But not only do you want your site to appear
in the search engine lists, you want it to be near the top. Many web users look no further than
the first page of results and very few go further than page 3. Search engines use a scheme known
as ranking to determine how high up the list a particular site is placed and generally the more
prominently your site displays the search phrase and the more often it uses that term, and other words
relevant to it, the higher your site will be ranked.
The number of links into your site from others also plays a part in determining how important your site
appears to be. The more popular your site, the more important it is deemed to be. This is one
of the more dubious practices of search engines and often results in pages with hundreds of links to other
sites. Take care tho - too many links and your site risks being downgraded as a mere 'link farm'.
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Many older search engines used 'meta tags' embedded into web pages to determine what a
given page was about, but the more modern ones try to view the site as a human visitor
would and look at words in headings and in bold or italic text. Links and picture
captions or 'alt text' are also used by many search engines.
While no-one (despite the advertising hype of many "search engine optimising" companies)
can offer guarantees about search engine ranking. Abbeydale will offer advice about
how to construct and word your site to make it as search engine friendly as possible but
although we have acheived good rankings in the past we cannot make guarantees about the future.
Search Engine Myths
There are some major misconceptions about internet search engines - the biggest being
that you must repeatedly 'submit' your site to every search engine on the planet.
There are software packages that claim to submit to hundreds of search engines every
day. This is pointless - search engines find you. As long as there are
links to your site from others on the web then search engines such as Google and MSN
will find it, and list it. Even if there are no other links to your site submitting
it once to each search engine is enough. Once you are on the list, unless you do
something silly with your site, you will stay there.
Another myth is that it costs money to get a high ranking. The fact is that search engines
are based on software algorithms and you can't bribe a piece of software! The sheer size of
the internet and the speed with which it changes means it can't be done manually. This is
one reason why small companies can compete on even terms with larger ones on the internet.
Your search engine ranking depends entirely on the cleverness and popularity of your site and not
on the depth of your pockets!
Pay Per Click
However... there are advertising schemes, known as 'pay-per-click' that will get you on the
first couple of pages of search results but in a panel separated from the real search results.
Your pay-per-click entry is clearly an advert but at least it's up there on page 1. You pay,
not to display the ad, but when someone clicks on it and is taken to your web site. Very often
pay-per-click campaigns are used with new web sites for extra prominence and to get people on to
your site before the search engines list your site in the usual way (which can take several weeks).
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