Improving your search-engine status - Part 4
Rating websites on the basis of their 'popularity' is becoming increasingly important, especially with the success of Google.
As we noted previously, there are two indices of popularity that search-engines can use: the number of links from other sites to your pages, and the number of people who click through on your link when it is presented in search results.
In each case, gaining popularity is a problem of the chicken-and-egg variety. In order to put up links to your site people need to have found the site in the first place, and in order to have people click through to you from search results you first need to appear on them.
So let's consider how you might persuade people to link to your site before it appears on search-engines. The basic, common-sense answer would seem to be this - make it a good site, and tell lots of people about it. Then, once you have a number of links up, and start appearing on search-engine listings, hopefully your popularity will start to snowball.
Of course, this is hugely a matter of taste. But again, we can use commonsense to find some good-making factors. So, sites which provide useful, hard-to-find information are good. Sites which amuse or entertain are good. Sites which provide useful functionality are also good (to declare an interest - our company provides bespoke functionality for websites).
One approach is to use standard marketing practices (whatever they might be) to tell the general public about your site. Another, increasingly popular approach is to get together with sites which cover similar or complementary material, and agree to have reciprocal links.
There are lots of search-engines out there, all with different methods of submission. So how should one go about the whole process of submission?
The best approach, if you are doing it for yourself, is to put in the time researching which search-engines you want to submit to, and the submission process for each one. These details are freely available from portal sites like
www.submitcorner.com
Alternatively, you could make use of one of the tools that automatically submits you to a number of search-engines. The only concern about these is that search-engines tend not to like them very much. And, since they can generally tell if a submission has come through such a tool, you run the risk of being penalised.
If you are keen to get your site very near the top of the search-engine ratings, you should be prepared for a lot of continuing work. For example, one large company found that it was spending 30 man-hours a week just on keeping its ratings up.
The problem, of course, is that ratings go down as well as up, especially if you have competitors trying to get their sites above yours. The situation can become one of measure and countermeasure, with competitors analysing each other's meta tags, content, etc.
The decision or not to participate in this search-engine rat-race is, naturally, up to each company. But one word of warning - if you choose to pay a specialist firm to improve your rating, you may have to continue paying them to maintain that rating.
Our advice is to take a long-term strategy to increasing your search-engine status. There is no quick fix, but if you set aside some time each month to check your rankings and re-evaluate your approach in light of the considerations given above, then you should do better than most.
There are companies which will take on the job of improving your search ratings. But it may make more sense if you are an SME or individual to check out the submission details for yourself, and get your own hands dirty optimising your code...
... and once you've got your hands dirty, you'll probably need a nice cleansing bath. In which case you'll want a lovely yellow duck sponge, which apparently you can order online from Amazon.com, a snip at $5.49...
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