PaulGSmith.com: Web Analytics, Usability and More

Addressing the on-page and off-page factors is really the best way to ensure your pages are relevant for the appropriate keywords. And the best way to do this is to take time and create a traffic improvement plan that includes a continuous series of systematic changes, testing, and evaluation.

However, if you really want to get listed or improve your traffic quickly, the I would always recommend some kind of pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. A PPC campaign using a tool like Google Ad Words can produce measurable results in minutes and get you to the top of almost any search result page. However, it will cost you. You must be careful in any PPC campaign since you are paying for each of the visitors to your site. PPC marketing is an extremely powerful tool in any search engine optimization plan.

And once you have decided to focus your attention on these search engines, the single most important factor to consider is relevancy. Search engines still make their most of their money from advertisers (and their ads). To make money they need to show their ads to as many people as possible. And the basic fact is that visitors choose to use a particular search engine because of the “relevancy” of the results they get. Think about it.

Then the critical job becomes making your pages more relevant to the major search engines. To do this you need to consider both “on-page” and “off-page” factors. The most important on-page factors are all related to keywords and the placement of keywords throughout your page. Other on-page factors include things like title tags, description tags, and anchor text (link text). But these also include things like bold or italicized text, text in HTML links, and alt tags for images. The most important off-page factors are related to inbound links (the anchor text, the text in paragraph surrounding the anchor text, and even the titles of pages linking to your pages. There are many more.  Systematically addressing these factors and carefully assessing the impact of your changes lies at the heart of any effective search engine optimzation effort.

Many people have asked me about the need to “submit” their websites to popular search engines. At one time there were plenty of services available promoting these kinds of services. But I can’t remember the last time I recommended this course of action for anyone. The reason for this is simple. Google is the single most important entry in the search engine market and Google clearly prefers to “discover” sites from the external links in other websites. Google clearly states this preference on their AddURL page. Submitting a site is clearly NOT necessary.

We all know that Google has a solid lock on the Internet search market, at least from an end-user point of view. But not everyone knows the other major players. At this time it looks like Yahoo!, Windows Live, and Ask also need to be considered, especially in any search engine optimization project. Google stands alone at the top because of it’s strong user base, but don’t forget it also drives the back-end of many other sites, most notably AOL, Earthlink, and AT&T. 

Yahoo! is the next nearest competitor to Google in the search market. According to Comscore at the end of 2007, Yahoo! accounted for about 22.9% of all internet searches (compared to 58.4% for Google). Windows Live and Ask probably rank right behind in the vicinity of 10%. But Windows Live is agressively growing it’s user base; and ASK probably has some of the most interesting search technology. Most solid search optimization efforts are probably fairly safe in focusing on these four important search engines.