The Truth About Search Engines!

By Curtis Stevens
Posted Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Learn the truth on how you get your web site ranked on today's search engines!
The search engines are constantly changing and a few years ago, it was very difficult to get your web site ranked. However today it is relatively easy. According to online ratings, Google & Yahoo now have over 65% of the Internet audience and we will demonstrate how you can take advantage of the traffic.

Yahoo.com

Yahoo charges a yearly reoccurring $299 fee for all business related web sites. Visit their web site for more details on this. Keep in mind when looking for a category that it helps your ranking if your keyword(S) are in the url of the category.

Example: You are a wholesaler:

(http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Wholesalers/)

You need to think of one/two of your most important keyword(s) and make sure it is in your title of your listing. For example, if you wanted "merchant accounts", then you could name your site "Got Merchant Accounts?". For Yahoo to use the title that you desire, it must be the name of your logo. You have two options to solve this:

1. You can change your company logo to reflect the keyword(s) you want in your title.

2. You can create a complete copy of your original web site with your new name & logo on a different domain name. One advantage to this option is you can accurately track your orders to determine if Yahoo is satisfying your needs. You need to make sure your description for your listing is well written and includes your main keyword(s) along with many others. However you want to avoid it being a list of keywords.

DMOZ.org

DMOZ is an important free search engine. Follow the same steps as for Yahoo.

Google.com

Google is constantly climbing in their reach of audiences. To be listed in Google, you will need to get your site listed on DMOZ or submit your site manually with their submission tool. They periodically update the listings about every week. They use their own technique to then rank web sites which is called PageRank. Unfortunately Google doesn't expose how it ranks web sites, but this is what we have discovered. They use a combination of how many times a keyword is in the homepage, title and along with your ranking number in their PageRank tool. Keep in mind that you need to find the right combination of how many times your keywords are displayed in your homepage compared to the current top listings. To determine your PageRank number, you need to download Google's toolbar which you can find here: (http://toolbar.google.com/). They use a numbering system of 1-10. Basically the more web sites that have a high PageRank number that are linking to you, the higher your number will be. You want to strive for 6 or higher.

AOL - Netscape - Hotbot

These search engines display the results from Google along with Overtrue.com's top 3 listing called "Sponsored Listings". See more below.

Looksmart & Overture.com

Looksmart uses a "pay per click" format similar Overture.com and displays its listings on MSN, AltaVista, CNN, etc. You can get more information here: (http://listings.looksmart.com/)

Overture.com is a "pay per click" search engine, where the highest bidder gets to be on top. Simply put the more you are willing to pay, the higher your listing will be. We personally feel Overture.com isn't a very wise investment if you are able to get ranked on the search engines (Google & Yahoo). Since most of the search engines that display their listings (top 3), also display Google's results below them such as AOL. If you are not able to get ranked on Google, then this would be another option, but it can become a pricing one.

About the Author
Curtis Stevens is with Simple Solutions which sells web site and ecommerce hosting. He is also involved with one of their subsidiary web sites called Gotmerchant.com and it is an online merchant account tutorial web site that shows people how to accept credit cards. For more information on Simple Solutions go to (http://www.sshost.com) or (http://www.gotmerchant.com) for GM.