Interactive Media

The SEM Scam Sales Pitch
BY P.J. Fusco, July 20, 2005
I like learning about different vendors' approaches to delivering similar SEM services.
Search engine algorithms are perpetually tweaked and refined to gather, sort, and
report the most relevant results for users. more....

Is Your Website Search Engine Friendly? Your Personal Checklist

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is taking a website and improving the way search engines read your site. The search engines use
algorithms- their secret formulas to determine where to rank a website. The idea is to give the people using the search engine,
relevant search results.

Search Engines send robots, crawlers, or spiders, code that can read web pages, to your site. They look at how your site is built and
what kind of information you have.

Search engines index or store this information on their database servers. When someone types a search term, they query the
database. The results you see are what the search engine thinks the person wants to look at based on their algorithms and what
the robot read on your website.

There are elements of sites the robots can read and others they cannot.

What the spiders look for: Title, description, keywords, the number of links to your site, number of links to relevant content,
relevant content, and alt text on images.

What the spiders don't like: Flash, Java script, dynamic URLs, Frames, Image maps.

They can't read the information in the above examples. Back to top

Two sources, www.Ranking.com , and www.alexa.com compile information from sites. They rank websites by the number of visitors
you receive. People surfing the web find Websites 42% of the time through search engines. Having your site on a search engine or a
directory, and being in the top 40 listings for a search term, has become very important in gaining visitors.

Which search engines should you be on? While there are thousands of search engines you can be on, 93% of the total internet
searches are coming from the top 10 search engines. Yahoo, Google, MSN and AOL are the largest. All the other engines and
directories combined are producing only 7% of searches made on the internet.

There are two ways to get your site on a search engine.

You can submit your website to various search engines and directories for free or pay to be submitted. Each search engine has
criteria of what they will accept on a website. Some will not accept racist sites, pornographic sites, illegal activity, or profanity. Others
are targeted to countries, or regions. Some are open and others closed to commerce sites. Each engine reviews a website to see
if it wants your site in their database.

The free search engines are usually smaller engines looking to build in size. There are thousands of engines that fit this category.

You are not automatically in just because you fill out their form. They review your site. If your site is accepted, their spiders, or crawlers
will index your pages and links to see how your site is optimized. This process can take 2 to 6 weeks before you begin to find yourself
on that engine. Even then, it may take a while before you move up in the rankings.

If you choose to pay a search engine to be included, you are not automatically accepted because you paid. You still go through the
process of being reviewed and accepted or rejected. You are processed, possibly accepted and indexed, quicker if you pay. Having
your site accepted quickly is the reason to pay for inclusion to a search engine. Paying for inclusion does not get you better rankings
than someone who submitted their site for free. Back to top

Meridian Solutions has links on this page to companies that will submit your site for free to many search engines. Having your site
on them will help your ranking because of the links to your site.

They also offer a paid service to submit your site to the better search engines. Why pay someone to submit to the better search
engines? You'll want to pay someone because you want the traffic that the engine can bring to your site. Also, the required
forms for inclusion to some engines can be filled out by software that submits your site to many engines at one time. Some of the
big engines need to be filled out by hand and requires a code that the software can't see. This way the engine isn't spammed with
applications. This process takes time.

As a business owner, you need to decide if it's worth your time to do this yourself. You could pay one of your staff to do it instead of
what they normally do, or pay a company to do it efficiently.

Search Submit Express offers a single point of submission into Yahoo!, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, and other portals. A non-refundable
annual review fee is charged per domain, per URL for setting up your account and for quality review of your pages. Once your pages
are accepted into their program, a cost-per-click fee is charged for each lead driven to your site.

  You pay only when someone clicks on your listing. You choose what search terms you want to pay for, and set a price you are will
to pay for that term. There are two types of PPC programs. One, you set a monthly budget and your listings come down when the
money is spent during the month. Two, you set the account to run the listing through the month and are charged for the results
afterwards.

Your listing placement is based on the rate you pay. The higher you pay in relation to your competition, the higher you are placed.
Bidding wars can take place.

As with website submittals, you can do this yourself or hire a specialist to manage the programs for you. You can spend a large
portion of your time managing a PPC or CPC program, watching what the competition is doing. You also see how you can tweak the
listings to gain more clicks.

The major search engines that use this model of business are Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and LookSmart. MSN in 2005 launched
their own search engine that will soon include PPC listings. Back to top