For every dollar spent by our retailers in the last 12 months on search engine advertising, each one received a positive return on their investment of at least 10 times! Our search engine strategy is a proven process that has increased sales for our customers that they would not have seen if they had not used our service to promote their business.

The Search Engine Strategy

A popular Internet marketing strategy is to concentrate on registering with top search engines. Website designs must be optimised so that they can be listed under the most relevant search phrase combinations in search results. Listings are submitted to search engines such as AltaVista and Google, as well as leading directories like Yahoo. Search engine partner networks also affect where a website's listing will appear.

Don't get caught bending the rules

The exact methods and algorithms used by search engines to rank a site is keep secret and for the most part, is a matter of speculation. However, there are general guidelines provided by the search engines and search engine optimisation experts whose experience has shown what produces results. To complicate the issue, the rules applied to site ranking are constantly changing so keeping up is a time-consuming task.

Search engines are under pressure to keep their search results as relevant as possible in order to provide a useful search tool. They monitor sites for guerrilla tactics used by some marketers to better position their site at the top of search results.

An example of misleading tactics is for a designer to add the same word or phrase many times to a web page and hide them so that they are not visible on the page. A search engine will penalise a site it deems to be using misleading ranking tactics. And so, search engines change their methods to maintain and improve the quality of their results.

The truth is, there is no strategy that will guarantee to get you on top of search results and then keep you there. There are only strategies that will optimise your site for the best result possible for your target market. So the message is, beware of any guarantees of a top listing for your website!

How to list your website

To get your website indexed or registered, you need to enter your website address on each search engine's submission page. There are so many pages on the web now, that unless you tell them you exist, chances are they will never find you. If another website links to you, you may have a better chance. The number of new and modified pages appearing daily has driven the average time it takes for a page to appear after submission to up to six months! Some search engines will speed up this process for a fee.

There are also plenty of offers claiming, for example, submissions to 30,000 search engines! In reality though, all but a handful are used by the majority of internet surfers.

The new wave - paid search engine advertising

In a new advertising trend, search engines are beginning to offer advertising for a price using a bidding structure, known as pay-per-click. This revolution in online advertising is becoming more and more popular amongst marketers with more search engines beginning to offer the service, last year.

Pay-per-click involves advertisers in a bidding system with their competitors for relevant word and phrase combinations to establish their listing's position in search results advertising positions. Each search engine has its own interface and rules regarding bidding and editorial content. Search engines are also constantly adding to and changing their interface to improve their product offering to attract more advertisers.

How much time is involved?

The time involved in keeping up with what's happening on the internet and search engines is more than any business owner can afford to spend. Each search engine changes their rules regularly and information on how each one analyses your website is a daunting task. Making mistakes are missed opportunities that cost money and whose effects can linger for months.

Whilst there are no magic formulas to guarantee a number one search engine listing, with the right strategy, you can achieve the best result for your business's relevant search phrases.

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