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| Get in the Know: |
Coming this summer
Cyberspace HQ Announces Engine Monitor Service for search engines... find out the details.
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Getting Listed
A few words from our Senior Technical Specialist at The Cyb regarding 'Getting Listed on Search Engines'...
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The Truth
Find out the truth about search engine promotions and how you can get listed.
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| Customer Corner |
Do you have a unique perspective on e.marketing? If you are an authority on marketing,
and have a perspective that you would like to share with others, we just might be looking for you!
Click here to find out more.
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The truth behind search engine promotion
A little bit of history… A few years ago the Internet was a different
place. There were not many websites, and search engines were all accepting
submissions. Back then you could submit your site to a search engine and easily
attain good ranking. Naturally, a new market was created. Hundreds of search
engines were popping up, and webmasters wanted to be listed on all of them. The
process of submitting became quite a chore. Some smart software developers saw
the opportunity and designed software to help these people submit quickly to
all of these engines.
The search engine submission market got very big, very fast. Unfortunately, it
attracted many unscrupulous developers, who not only designed software to help
you submit, but also to help you subvert the rules search engines put in place
for their sites. Dozens of programs surfaced that gave people an unfair
advantage.
These programs that gave an unfair advantage created a huge problem for search
engines. All of the sudden, their databases were polluted with irrelevant
listings. A person might search for ‘sporting goods’, and discover the top 5
listings took them to porn sites or MLM sites. From the perspective of the
search engine, this was a huge problem. If a person couldn’t easily find
relevant results on a search, they would go to another search engine. Since the
search engine’s primary source of income at the time was from banner
advertising, this hit them right in the wallet. The main focus for a search
engine was no longer a larger database, but a more relevant search result.
Many search engines combated this problem by learning how webmasters were
subverting their rules, and wrote routines in their spiders that would detect
them. When they detected this, the site would be penalized. Still, rules are
made to be broken, many authors found ways to counter the detection, and a game
of cat and mouse began.
Another problem was that as these programs became more and more popular,
webmasters felt the need to continually submit their site. Not just a page or
two, but their entire site. Again, software appeared that not only allowed this
practice, but encouraged it. The load this put on the servers and bandwidth of
the search engines was huge, and caused a large problem. Add to that the
thousands of search engine submission services that popped up in the mix, and
one can imagine the severity of the problems the search engines faced.
Some search engines began to write software that would detect these automated
submissions and discard them. Still, the authors continued in the cat and mouse
game and write programs that could avoid detection.
All of these problems were magnified with the fact that many search engines
were having a difficult time attaining a profitable status. Banner advertising
wasn’t all it was expected to be.
Some of the solutions many search engines came up with are:
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Some went to a paid format. You have to pay to submit. This provides a new
source of revenue, and kills all of the automated submissions. The problem with
this is that it is still important to have a large database, so some of the
engines that require payment still have spiders ‘discovering’ new sites
naturally.
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Some accepted free submissions, but made a policy to penalize any free
submission in favor of naturally spidered listings.
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Some accepted free submissions, but ignored them completely.
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Some found a method that automated programs could not get around.
The search engines found a way to win a war that they could not afford to lose.
Here is the thing you probably don’t expect to read from us: We at Cyberspace
HQ applaud the search engines for having done what they have done.
You may be scratching your head, saying ‘But isn’t AddWeb one of the submission
programs described above?’ The answer is yes and no. AddWeb is, in part, a
submission program. In the early days it was little more than that. However,
our company has always maintained a very strict policy to make our software
search engine friendly. When the search engines posted a rule, we wrote code in
the program to help you abide by the rule, not to help you break it. We never
offered a ‘submit all your pages’ feature, and if an engine said submit no more
than once every 30 days, we made it very difficult for you to do otherwise.
The very fact that our software has always attempted to confine you to the
rules has been a huge problem for us, and has caused us to sit in the middle of
this battle. On one hand, we lost countless customers to software that helped
them break the rules. Our own customers have been demanding such features of us
for years, yet we didn’t give in. On the other hand, we have discussed this
very issue with executives at several major search engines, and from their
perspective, despite the fact that our software took a responsible approach;
they couldn’t help but group it with the others. We were flatly told that if
they sanctioned our software, they feared that they were sending a signal that
would cause the appearance that this ‘category’ of software was approved. It
was a point that made sense and was difficult to argue.
Still, you may be thinking that if submission does not work, what is the point
of AddWeb? The answer is that this article is part of an educational campaign
by Cyberspace HQ. In the same way that some actors have a difficult time
shedding their typecast roles, AddWeb has been typecast as ‘submission
software’. This is largely due to the fact that there are so many submission
programs on the market, but very few full-featured web promotion programs.
People tend to think of all the other features as ‘supporting features’, while
submission is the main focus. In fact, it once was. But look at the AddWeb
interface and note how many top-level features you see. Submission is one of
them, but it is not the main feature. Submission is not the best way to get
listed.
There are three ways to get listed on a search engine:
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Submit your website through free submission.
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Get visited by a search engine spider
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Submit your website through paid submission directly with the engine.
The fastest and most certain method is #3. To do it right, it will cost you
roughly $1,000 per site. If this is acceptable to you, AddWeb provides a
section that will help you do it.
If paid submission is not acceptable to you, or if you would like to leave it
as a final option, you are left with #1 and #2. Free submission is no longer
available for commercial sites on many of the major search engines, but it is
on many smaller engines. You would still be wise to use it where you can, but
you should never rely on it. You must remember that while you may experience a
successful submission, many search engines simply ignore these, so you will get
little benefit. Still, for the energy it takes to click a button to submit your
site, it is worth the gamble.
For all practical purposes, this leaves us with #2, Get visited by a search
engine spider. This is something that has long eluded many webmasters. After
all, spidering is an action initiated by the spider. You have no control. With
submission, there is a clear process that you initiate. How do you make a
spider visit your site?
This is explained by the way spiders work. Imagine you had a quest to visit as
many different websites as possible today without ever touching your keyboard.
All you are allowed is the ability to select a URL to start from. You could
only click on links, and the BACK button on your browser. What would you do?
Now imagine that every site you visit will be added to a search engine. Now
imagine that thousands of people just like you are doing the same thing. The
search engine would get a pretty big database in a short period of time, yet
none of the websites will have submitted to you. That is how a spider works. It
browses the web and discovers new sites.
Now imagine two websites: www.bobswidgets.com and www.billsgadgets.com. No
other website has links to Bob. On the other hand, Bill has traded links with
1,000 other websites, which means that there are at least 1,000 other websites
out there that link to his. If you and another 1,000 people are on that quest,
what are the chances that you will ever find a link to Bob’s site? What are the
chances that you will find a link to Bill’s site?
Next, imagine that one of the sites that links to Bill has paid a search engine
to have their spider visit his site every day. Bill can be quite confident that
by trading these links, he will get visited by a search engine spider. However,
Bob is hopeless. Perhaps Bob has submitted his site, and is hoping that a
spider will eventually use his site as a starting page, but Bill didn’t need
to.
The LinkTrader feature in AddWeb 5 is a first-to-market managed link trading
service, which is free for all registered users of AddWeb 5. We know that you
don’t have 1,000 other webmasters in your pocket that want to trade links with
you. However, Cyberspace HQ has thousands of AddWeb customers that want to
trade links with others. In LinkTrader, we have created a first of its kind
link matchmaking service. The software helps trading partners find one another,
manage the links, keep one another honest, and create pages with reciprocal
links. It is the most aggressive new offering in search engine promotion in
years.
Besides raising the likelihood that you will be spidered and listed, there are
three additional benefits to LinkTrader:
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More natural traffic
Remember, if you are trading links with 1,000 other sites, they are real site
with human traffic. Those humans have the opportunity to browse to your site.
Never discount the direct traffic that reciprocal links can provide.
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Higher link popularity
Some search engines rank heavily based on link popularity. All things being
equal, if two sites are competing for the #1 spot, the one that is more popular
will win. Popularity is often based on how many other sites in the database
have links to each site. So if there are 1,000 sites in the database linking to
you, and only 500 to the other, you win.
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Search engine friendly
Over the years, many search engines have made statements in which they say they
are attempting to get more human results. They want to follow links that are
part of the human decision making process, not through something like an FFA
site. In other words, if you put a link on your site, they want to follow it.
If it is unrelated, they don’t want to. LinkTrader is a form of assisted human
decision making. It does not decide what to put on your site, you do. You
select trading partners and they select you. It is all a human decision making
process, which is in turn helped along by automation. LinkTrader fits within
the desires that some search engines have voiced.
Getting listed at something better than position #495,927
OK, so far we have focused on getting listed. It is, after all, the primary
concern, right? Wrong! Why be on a search engine if nobody can find you? The
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) world is sharply divided. If you ask 5 experts
how to get a good ranking, you can be guaranteed of one thing: You will get 5
different answers, and 5 very expensive bids for your business. The bulk of the
information will be why they are the best, and whom they have pushed to the
top. So if you get 5 kinds of conflicting advice, which is right, and how do we
know we are right with the advice in this article?
The answer is simple: For the most part, they are all probably right. There are
general guidelines that pretty much everyone follows, and there are ‘secret
weapons’ that nearly everyone claims to have. Some of it is good, some is snake
oil, and some can really damage your hopes for success. The best piece of
advice we can give is if an SEO expert says he must host your page in order to
get you high ranking, avoid it like the plague. If they need to host your page,
one (or both) of two things is going on:
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They are using a technique called ghosting, which is specifically banned by
nearly all search engines. Basically, they highly optimize a page that is
certain to score well, but is ugly as can be to a human, so when they detect a
search engine spider, they serve a page specifically designed to fool it, but
if they detect a human, they get a nice, eye pleasing page. This has proven to
be effective for many, but the people that program the spiders are smart, and
may detect what is being done. If you are detected, expect your site to be
banned forever.
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Suppose you pay a company to get you a good position and they are hosting your
page. You no longer have control of the page. All of the sudden, your search
engine listings are controlled by someone else. If you are unhappy and wish to
stop the service, they have the ability to remove your page (or change it).
Now, anyone that finds you on the search engines will be sent to wherever they
want them to be sent to. A responsible SEO expert will naturally not take
advantage of this situation, but then again, why would they require the page to
be hosted on their servers?
AddWeb has several SEO features for the do-it-yourselfer: Page Advisor and Page
Builder. Page Advisor is designed to look at your pages and offer advice from
an SEO perspective. The advice it will give you is based on a combination of
two principles:
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General Practices
As mentioned above, there are general guidelines that all SEO experts will
apply. Page Advisor will look at your pages and offer advice on these.
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Literal Comparison
Cyberspace HQ wrote a spider of its own. Instead of spidering websites, it
spiders search results. Based on our ranking technology, it goes though various
keywords and performs searches on major engines. It then takes the top 10
listings on each and analyzes the content of the pages that are served. We have
broken down virtually every element in a web page and on each result the spider
analyzes that element. The result of the analysis is stored in a database. The
collective results of thousands of such searches are then analyzed for trends.
If the vast majority of the top ranking sites share a particular property, or
don’t have something, that fact is stored in a guidelines database, which is
shipped with AddWeb. Page Advisor will analyze your pages based on these
results, and provide you with relevant advice.
The results don’t necessarily mean that these things are required to get you a
good position, but they do show you an important piece of information. If your
site gets a low grade in an element, you know that most top-ranking sites are
different in that area. Note. However, that if 100,000 top ranking sites were
analyzed, and 90% of them shared an element, Page Advisor will suggest that you
have that element, as well. But one must consider that in that case, 10,000
sites did not have the element, so it isn’t necessarily an absolute must.
In any case, Page Advisor gives you a view into statistics that no other
software or SEO (unless he uses AddWeb) can.
Page Builder is the other side of Page Advisor. This is where you take the
advice in Page Advisor and apply it to your pages. Since most web design
software concentrates on visual elements of a page, it is cumbersome to work on
the non-visual elements, such as META Tags, Image Alt Text, etc. Page Builder
concentrates on these areas. You give it an existing web page, and it will
guide you through all of the elements that you can change to better optimize
it. Page Builder will also allow you to make new doorway pages; however, this
is not highly advisable.
Tying it all together
The rest of the features in AddWeb are mostly for analysis, statistics, and
supporting operations. Don’t underestimate these.
The SiteStats LIVE feature is equally, if not more important. Have a look at
the search engine reports in SiteStats and you will see how people are finding
your site. Remember that even though you may not have targeted a keyword or
phrase, you may being doing well with it. Finding key phrases that people are
using to find your site will often clue you in on other words and phrases that
you can target. In other words, you might discover that while you think people
will look for a site such as yours with the keyword ‘widget’, many are actually
using ‘gadget’.
Conclusion
I hope you have noticed at least one thing in this article: We showed you many
things you can do to promote your site without ever actually submitting it to
search engines. While the world still speaks of search engine promotion in
terms of ‘how to submit’, the reality is that you don’t need to, and in some
cases you should avoid it.
We are not saying that you should not submit. By all means, do so! However,
don’t rely on it. It is merely one way to help you achieve your goals, and not
necessarily the best.
The important thing we want you to consider is that many people purchase an
AddWeb license for the purpose of submitting their websites. AddWeb offers much
more, and all too many webmasters ignore this. We often hear people comment
that they purchased AddWeb, submitted their site, and have had no success. We
invariably learn in such cases that they don’t use the features available, and
rely on submission alone. It is a big mistake.
Happy promoting!
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products? We now offer ESD and Physical Distribution services for software developers. Would you like to know
more? Click Here.
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| What
is ServiceTraq? |
The ultimate solution for Customer Service and
technical support for any company with a web presence.
Featuring a powerful and intelligent self-help solution, integrated message system
that delivers customer messages to the right person, efficient case management,
Live Chat, and customizable surveys.
ServiceTraq is incredibly scalable and affordable for businesses of any size.
To find out more about ServiceTraq visit our website or click here.
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