Search engine promotion: how to maximise your online presence

Search engine promotion and optimisation to top the search engines


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A couple of years ago 99% all searches were carried out on seven big search engines, and you had to promote yourself with all of them. Luckily for you, today you only need to focus on two: Google and Overture.

Google Google is the last remaining free search engine, it gives search results generated by their "spiders" that crawl the web. To these spiders your web site is their food - they gather the information about your site and take it back to Google where is passed through their formulas to determine your ranking. You can win the search engine war on Google through search engine optimisation. You will have to be patient, it can take between 30 to 60 days to be listed on Google.

Overture on the other hand, is a pay-per-click search engine, run like an auction. You can get a top ranking on Overture by simply out-bidding the next highest bidder. All it takes to outbid someone is a penny.

Overture listings appear as part of the search results for many different sites, including Yahoo!, MSN and AltaVista. If you want immediate traffic you can buy your way to a top listing in 3 to 5 days.

You need to do this cost-effectively, rather than getting involved in a bidding war. If you know how many people come to your web site before you get one sale, and what your profit margin is per sale you can calculate how much you can afford to pay per visitor, or per click. For example

1 sale = £5 profit
100 visitors = 5 sales
100 visitors = £25
You can afford 25p per visitor.

Don't forget this is a one off fee. If someone becomes a lifetime customer you can perhaps afford to pay more.

Overture is a great way of generating traffic to your site, but it comes at a price. If you want free traffic from Google you need to optimise your web site so it appears high up Google's listings.

Inktomi is a database that supplies many smaller search engines with their results. It costs around £20 a year to get listed in the Inktomi database, but your site is still ranked according to how well it is optimised. Search engine optimisation is something you just can't ignore.

Your web site statistics are invaluable in search engine promotion, and should be able to show you how many people are coming to your site from which search engines, and what they were searching for. If you don't have web site statistics, contact your hosting company.