Note: This seminar took place on August 1, 2003 at the Internext Traffic Roundtable Panel. Below is the complete version of the presentation. Several points had to be excluded due to time restrictions.

"I’d like to start out today talking about the current landscape of the search engine arena; such as who is powering whom, who owns what, and what may change in the coming months.

"Since everyone searches a different way, hitting on as many relevant keywords and phrase matches is the key to building long term traffic in quantity."

Traffic Patterns as of May 2003 (Provided by Internet.com’s Ad Resource) show that the top visited networks and properties are MSN followed closely by AOL, Yahoo, and Google for both home and work usage. Upon closer inspection when looking into who owns and is powered by whom, it is easy to see one very common thread…there are still options available to get indexed in them all for FREE.

MSN – MSN is mainly powered by the Looksmart directory and Inktomi results that may already be phasing out with the launch of MSN’s own crawler – MSNBot. You can still submit to MSN for free via the BCentral SubmitIt page.

AOL - AOL recently dropped Overture in favor of Google and is completely powered by Google’s primary search results and Google Adwords. Directory results are provided by Open Directory.

You can submit for free to Google at Google.com and to Open Directory at DMOZ.org.

Yahoo – Yahoo is currently powered by the Yahoo Directory with integrated search results from Google, and sponsor listings provided by Overture. This has been a recipe for success over the past year for Yahoo, gaining back regular users who simply go where Google is, and increase ad revenue through Overture. Yahoo Directory requires a yearly listing fee of about 600$ for adult related sites.

Please note that although Overture may provide paid listings for Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, Altavista, AlltheWeb and more, Overture is not a true search engine or portal.

Overture is primarily an ad serving engine which provides “Sponsored” listings as an ad network feature which creates a solid revenue stream for many portals.

Earlier this year Overture bought both AltaVista and AllTheWeb. But more than just additional property to place paid listings on, what Overture really bought were the search patents owned by Altavista and Fast Search.

On July 14th Yahoo announced a bid to buy Overture for $1.63 billion in cash and stock. Considering the ad revenue from Overture has been a key to Yahoo’s growth, this was the next step as Yahoo would also acquire in the deal 60-plus patents related to technology and processes for indexing the Web, as well as for pay-per-click bid-for-ranking system. Considering that the search market is expected to reap $4-billion in revenue by 2005, Yahoo plans to be in position to hold a solid corner of the market.

Yahoo is not expected to make a major change in powered-by results just yet. However, Yahoo’s acquisition of Inktomi for about $240 million back in December of last year has enabled the portal to acquire search powering technology as well as to eliminate another competitor. But not until later on this year, when the Overture deal is finalized and Yahoo! gets a grasp on all it’s newly acquired technology, do most marketers expect a change in powered-by results. Yahoo could potentially drop Google in favor of AllTheWeb or Inktomi at any time.

Google – Google is only powered by Google results and Google Adwords. Google directory is powered by Open Directory. If you have trouble getting into Google, sometimes it helps to setup a small Adwords campaign for a few weeks until the engine re-indexes. Since you can control your maximum daily spending allowance, it is now much easier to control how your funds are spent.

I often like to call DMOZ the “UN-Open Directory Project”, as it is still reliant on human volunteer editors and not that well maintained. If you submit to a category without an editor, try going up to the next level where there is an assigned editor and contact them through the site. From my experience, a little human interaction is required to get listed in this human edited directory.

Regardless of who is buying whom or changing what, most of the search results and traffic will still derive from these 4 main portals.

Another engine I highly suggest working on a presence in is AllTheWeb.com. Although AllTheWeb.com was bought by Overture, eventually to be passed on to Yahoo, this engine gives fairly good results based on relevance and speed and is almost as large as Google with 2 billion indexed pages. One downfall is that AllTheWeb’s portal interface has the adult content filter automatically turned on, so the user must adjust their customizable settings if they wish to view adult content.

On the plus side, AlltheWeb powers Lycos and it is free to submit at both AlltheWeb.com and Lycos.com. (You must register as a member at Lycos to submit for free).

Optimization

These days when it comes to optimizing pages for search engines it is no longer a matter of repeating the same word 6 times in 3 places on the page, a couple links and a good title. Now that search engine technology has become more advanced, ranking for a specific range of keywords in now reliant on the actual content of your site.

When launching a new site it is important to optimize your meta tags according to the actual textual content appearing on that page. In most cases, the widest range of your target keyword set is going to be your index page.

By picturing your site as a pyramid, with your home page on top, design a “KEYWORD PYRAMID” (Tool & Complete Explaination) where your top priority keywords are at the top and exponentially grow down each level to secondary keywords, still relevant to your site although not necessarily your main page.

The idea is to create search engine friendly property, or virtual real estate – by making the most of your actual site available for ranking, which often means censored tours or no free hardcore as surfers can walk directly into your site from the search engine bypassing your disclaimer page. If your main page opens into your navigation of your site, once your index page is optimized go into each page individually and optimize each for keywords that appear in the content of the page.

If your page does not have any keyword content in it, create some using the keywords you wish to rank for in as many ways of READABLE usage as possible. For example, rather than saying “Free Porn! Free Sex Pics! Free Hardcore Movies!” vary the usage in several places in sentence format such as “Free Hardcore Sex Movies and Porn Pics” or “Hardcore Sex Pics and Free Porn Movies”.

By using sentences featuring different keyword phrase usages of the same set of keywords, you can better target exact phrase matching that is so important for engines like Google. Help certain key phrases stand out in your code by making them a different color than the rest of your text, making them a link – cross linking to other relevant pages per keyword, or placing the phrase in “quotes”.

Optimize your meta tags with the same consistency in mind. Many webmasters have asked me “how many keywords should go in the title, description, and keyword tags?” The truth is there is no one all correct solution. Since the density, link relevance, and popularity of each site is different, the answer is a happy medium for each page. If there was one always successful formula, it would deem the engines worthless within no time at all.

Keep in mind that in most cases Less is More and going overboard can do more harm than good. It is always best just to keep your textual Search engine friendly content right there on the page rather than hidden by color or layers.

Not every design is search engine friendly so sometimes you may find yourself simply doing what you can and bending the rules a bit. 100% graphical designs that feature 0 textual content can be very challenging to integrate content into, however there are always alternative ways of integrating content into your code, such as in image Alt and Name tags, comment tags, no frames tags, form/input tags, and anchor tags. Knowing HTML code itself can give you a huge advantage as a marketer.

When a search engine spiders a page for indexing it may only scan a few lines of code at a time, or for Google until the page is cached. It is important to keep your code as clean as possible making it easier for the spider to index the content of your site.

This means that by moving any heavy JavaScript to call from an external .js file or by using includes for the consistent graphical areas of your site, you can make the actual content of your page easier for the spiders to fully index upon first visiting. Also consider that some engines weight your keyword density as compared to your code, not just what appears on the page. By keeping your code as clean and light as possible, you can make your own content more relevant to your own page and a full spidering upon first indexing possible.

With all this in mind, once your complete site is optimized it is important to SUBMIT your pages MANUALLY to the search engines! If you are going to spend all that time optimizing it's worth the 5 minutes. As a rule of thumb, do not submit more than 2 pages per domain per day, per engine.

Many webmasters wonder why not use auto submitters… The truth is whether it’s via Software or a web page, when you route your submissions through an auto submitter, every URL submitted from every user is originating from an IP that is auto posting to the engine. Most search engines consider automated use of the engine a violation of terms of service. If one IP is sending 1000 submissions per day, odds are the major engines will ignore the submissions from that IP. One individual from one specific IP submitting 2 pages per day is much more powerful than anything automated, and you can be sure your efforts were not all-for-naught and confirm the submission yourself.

Another thing to be aware of is when tracking your rankings using software like Web Position Gold that this too sends automated queries to the search engine. I do not recommend using this type of software more than a few times per year per domain name.

When tracking your ranking success do manual searches for some benchmark keyword phrases you have optimized for. Check your web site stats for referring keywords and URLs from search engines to see what keywords are sending you traffic and don’t be surprised if the numbers are not as high as expected for some top rankings. Since everyone searches a different way, hitting on as many relevant keywords and phrase matches is the key to building long term traffic in quantity.

Now is time to cross the bridge to expand beyond just the pages of your site and to develop keyword specific pages to increase that range of exposure in the engines. There has been much controversy over the use of Doorway pages and how they either do not work anymore or are an unethical form of Search Engine Marketing because of “low quality content”. The truth is, doorway pages still work when made correctly can lead visitors to your site where the “high quality” content is found quite effectively. In the best-case-scenario the user does not even realize they have entered through a doorway.

The happy medium when it comes to developing “doorway pages” for promotion in the search engines is to simply create more pages of your site, that are optimized, contain relevant content, and meet both the rules of the search engines and the expectations of the user.

Potentially every page you create, albeit for TGP’s, Pic Posts or even link lists can be turned over and optimized for search engines as well as added as a permanent part of your site. Just remember to remove links to full sized images from your expired but optimized TGP’s so that your bandwidth bills do not skyrocket after you have submitted and long forgotten about them.

Cross linking and interlinking all your pages together is very important. If you use multiple domains for promotion, you can help to increase the relevance and popularity of your own property by linking everything together as a “network” or sites.

All in all this rough overview on Search Engine Marketing is meant to demonstrate that there are still plenty of viable search engine traffic sources that webmasters can tap into for free. Not everyone wants to become an expert in search engine marketing, but if there is one webmasters skill that pays off long term, SE marketing is it.

To Summarize:

Have a plan and be consistent in your efforts. Know what your target market is searching for and what keyword will drive you Sales above traffic quantity.

Don't expect and don't promise overnight success, and don't give up if it doesn't happen right away. Patience and persistence is key. Be imaginative when making promo pages and conscious of elements that affect search engine optimization when designing a new site and when writing content.

Don’t try to copy meta tags, densities or pages that are currently ranking. Get a good idea of what they have in common and build on it, don't mimic it.

When redesigning your site, it is important to keep all the page names the same and re-implement past marketing efforts into the new pages so that you do not drop out of the index or have 404 pages ranking in the engines. As a default, it’s a good idea to setup your domain to re-route any 404’s to your index page.

The engines make it very clear what they want from your optimized site. Follow the rules the best you are able and play the engines straight for long term success. I have had both index and doorway pages hold rankings for over 4 years. By giving the engines what they want you can ensure that when changes do come, you will be in line with any new expectations for future challenges ahead.

If anyone is interested in viewing my previous articles please click here for link references to them all online.

It has been a pleasure speaking for you this past Internext. Hope you had a great show and Happy promoting!"