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Issue 1-6a Contents:

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The New Search Engine on the Block. . . Aesop Part 1
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Hello and welcome
Welcome back everyone. Aesop is a new search engine on the Internet. Again, Robin Nobles of Academy of Web Specialists brings us her insights into SEO and information on this new search engine. Thanks for reading, and check out the special this month. It is for a limited time only.

Remember that if you have any interesting news or tips from verifiable sources, send them into ed@cyberspacehq.com.

Growing your e-business is our business!

Enjoy the June 2001 Edition.

The New Search Engine on the Block. . . Aesop Part 1
by Robin Nobles

Pickings are getting pretty slim in the major search engine industry. This year, we lost GO, and we'll most likely be losing NBCi and Excite before the end of the year. Excite closed Magellan recently. Every time an engine folds, it's painful to those of us in the industry.

And regretfully, we haven't had a new spider engine to surface in some time . . . until the Aesop engine.

Aesop (http://www.aesop.com) is a brand new spider search engine established by the Aesop Marketing Corporation, a well-known marketing company that promotes products such as 1001 Killer Internet Marketing Tactics and Swiss Army App for Webmasters.

What makes Aesop rather unique is that a marketing company developed it, rather than some highly skilled technical gurus who might need to take Business 101. In other words, Aesop just might succeed in doing what the majority of the major engines haven't: make a profit!

Because a marketing company developed Aesop, you'll see some definite differences in the way they do business. For one, when you submit to the engine, you're asked if you want to receive a copy of their online marketing newsletter. The choice is yours. In other words, they're using the power of permission e-mail marketing to harvest e-mail addresses for future marketing mail outs.

Do you blame them? If you set up a search engine or even a vertical directory, wouldn't you do the same thing? You'd be wasting valuable resources if you didn't.

What else does Aesop do that's different from some of the major engines? To begin with, they're keeping their search page simple. Walking in the footsteps of Google, Aesop does one thing on its search page: search.

Another unusual aspect of the Aesop engine is that it has its own META tag (http://www.aesop.com/metatag.htm). Will it help you with rankings in other engines? It's doubtful, but Mark Joyner, CEO of the Aesop Marketing Corporation and a top Internet marketing expert, says that it will definitely boost your rank at the Aesop engine dramatically.

To learn more about the Aesop engine, I asked Mr. Joyner some questions.

Question: In what direction are you headed with the engine? A portal? Pay per clicks? Or, a combination?

Joyner: We have a unique advertising model that we are perfecting right now. Should be out in a month or so. It won't be like anything else you've seen yet.

Question: If you're considered PPC's, who are you looking to partner with?

Joyner: We have considered partnering with existing PPC engines (I can't say who), but that probably won't be the route we go.

Question: So many of the major engines have tremendous problems with spamming. So far, what are you experiencing in terms of spamming? What practices do you consider to be spamming?

Joyner: Of course from day 1, the spammers will get in there and try to mess up the results of any engine. We are taking an aggressive approach to preserve the integrity of the engine for the searcher.

I consider the following to be spamming:

* Deliberately attempting to have your site indexed under an unrelated term. (Which is really stupid in my book anyway, since someone searching for "Pamela Anderson" probably does not want to hear about a "make money fast scheme.")

* Deliberately attempting to have the same content indexed more than once by submitting the same content on different HTML pages. (Once again, stupid anyway, since someone seeing a listing 10 times in an engine will know what the spammer is up to, and will have lost all credibility.)

Question: What is the standard submission to index period?

Joyner: Varies, but we're hoping to get it down to 48 to 72 hours.

Question: Will you be using human editors to review submissions at some point in the future?

Joyner: Absolutely. Of course, indexing will be automatic, but we already have humans spot checking for spam and quality.

In Part 2, we'll continue with the interview of Mr. Joyner.

This article was written by Robin Nobles, a professional freelance writer and the Director of Training at the Academy of Web Specialists (http://www.academywebspecialists.com). Over the past few years, she has trained thousands of people in her online and onsite courses in search engine positioning strategies and has written three books that can be ordered through Amazon. Visit the Academy's training Web site to learn more about their online courses: http://www.onlinewebtraining.com.