Search engine optimization - SEO, website traffic

When first setting up a business, most people will register a domain name that mirrors exactly the name of their company. While this is certainly important for directing people to your Web site, many Web site owners do not realize that a good domain name can help with their search engine ranking. The Common Mistake
Let’s look at how this can have an impact on a Web site. Joe Smith sets up a Web site selling plastic widgets and proudly registers the domain name “JoeSmith.com.” This is a common practice, especially among smaller companies or entrepreneurs running their online businesses from home. However, Joe should also register a domain name that contains keywords that relate to the products he sells.

By having keywords in a domain name, Joe will do a lot more to help his site rank higher on the search engines than using his own name alone. What Joe needs to do is also register “plasticwidgets.com” or “plastic-widgets.com” and have those domain names point to the same site. A domain name with keywords embedded will do wonders, not only in achieving higher positioning on the search engines, but also in becoming more effective at informing a potential customer what the Web site sells. Now when a search is carried out for plastic widgets, Joe’s Web site is more likely to be displayed, as the domain name contains a match for the searched item.

Achieving the Advantage Without Spamming
You can easily test this strategy by going to any search engine and entering a popular search term. You will see that the Web sites displayed on the first few pages often have domain names filled with keywords. The search engines read the keywords in the domain name when reviewing the rest of the site. If two Web sites are equal, the one with keywords in a domain name will more likely be ranked higher.

When employing this technique it is important to remember not to submit both domain names to the search engines as you could end up being categorized as a spammer trying to get both domains listed for the same site. The consequences of this would likely mean that neither domain name gets registered by the search engines. The advice is to submit the optimized domain name to the search engines and leave the official domain name for your business cards and letterheads.

Are the Best Domain Names Gone?
If you have been to a domain name registrar recently, you have probably noticed that a lot of the good domain names have already been taken. If you are looking for a “.com,” you will more than likely give up in frustration before finding the name you want. The key thing to remember is that while most consumers only remember “.com,” the search engines treat all domain extensions the same. Consequently, “.net,” “.tv” and “.biz” are all treated exactly the same by the major search engines. These lesser used extensions open up a greater opportunity for registering a domain name that contains keywords relevant to the Web site. Follow my advice and register a “.com” as well for all other forms of marketing and you will achieve the best of both worlds.

Congratulations! Your Website is at the top of the search engine results and your traffic’s breaking records. Sales are up and your boss is grinning like a Cheshire cat. No doubt, as the person in charge of marketing your site, you’ve either spent hours researching on great sites such as Search Engine Guide or SitePoint and have achieved the results yourself or, more than likely, you’ve employed the services of a search engine marketing company. Either way, you now proudly sit at the top of the search engine results for your chosen keywords!

So now that you’re number one, you can sit back, relax and enjoy months of great positioning, right? Wrong! The effort it took to get your Website to the top position is nothing compared to the effort needed to keep it there.

Back when your site wallowed in search engine obscurity, none of your competitors worried about who you were, or what you did. But your rapid rise to the top of the search engine results has stirred the vipers’ nest — and now, your competitors are rattled! You can bet your life they’ll come after you with a vengeance.

Your competitors are likely to be hurting, both emotionally and financially. They’re going to want their #1 position back — and quickly! More than likely, they’ll curse themselves for becoming complacent, and seek professional assistance to find out why they dropped down the rankings, and how the situation can be fixed. Whatever the case, they’ll be working hard to ensure that the coveted #1 spot they once held is again in their possession.

A Checklist for Continued Success

Maintaining the top position once your competitors know who you are is a very time consuming and difficult job: sneaking ahead of the pack is easy when compared with ensuring that your site stays at the top of the search results. Maintaining that great level of exposure is going to take a lot of diligence and constant monitoring on you part.

In fact, there are things that you will need to do on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to ensure that your site stays put. These three checklists should keep you busy — but I think you’ll agree it’s worth the effort if it means you can hang onto top ranking.

Daily Checklist

Check your uptime

Make sure your Website is up and running 24/7. Nothing would be worse than your site displaying a “404 error” just as Google decides to drop in for a little spidering. If your site is down, even for only a few hours, you may lose your hold on the top position. If you don’t have time to monitor it yourself, InternetSeer offers a free site monitoring service that alerts you if your site goes down.

Make daily changes strategically consistent

Is your company using any of the Paid Inclusion services? If so, your website could be re-indexed as quickly as every 48 hours. With this in mind, any changes that you make to your site today, could affect your rankings tomorrow. Make sure that your website is consistent. I know of one company offering Japanese Hotels who removed the word “hotels” from all of their links and dropped from #5 positioning to #92!

Capitalize on trends

Review your site logs or statistics counter. If you don’t already have a site statistics package on your Web server, then head on over to WebTrends and get their statistics package. It’s imperative that you know who visits you, how long they stay, and which search engine brings them there. By checking this daily or every second day, you can note any trends as they begin to form, and be in a better position to capitalize on them.

Keep an eye on PPC bids

If you use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engines, make sure you keep tabs on your bids. In the blink of an eye, you could be paying too much (or too little) for your clickthroughs. In addition, learn to spot those fake clickthroughs. With your statistics package in place, you’ll easily be able to tell if you receive repeated clicks from the same IP address.

Weekly Checklist

Check your rankings

It’s important to check your search engine rankings at least weekly. Some of you may wish to check on a more frequent basis, while others can stretch it to every couple of weeks. Whatever the case, the important thing is to check them! The most popular and reliable ranking report software is available with WebPosition Gold. Using this software, you can track your own site’s position, and keep an eye on competitors. One word of advice: Google has publicly stated that they will penalize anyone that repeatedly uses automated reporting software to check their rankings on the engine. To avoid problems, you can either check your Google rankings only when an update occurs (usually in the first week of the month) or check them manually as often as you want.

Read your subscriptions

Subscribe to the many weekly search engine newsletters that are out there. Make sure you take time out to read them.

Keep up to date with SE news sites

Read the many articles and news available on respected search engine sites.

Visit your competitors

Visit the Websites of your biggest competitors and check for any dramatic changes they may have made to their content. View their source code from your browser and keep an eye on their Meta tags. A change in the content of their Meta tags is usually the first sign that your competitor is trying to out-position you.

Monthly Checklist

Keep content fresh

Keep your website content up-to-date and fresh. Check all your links and make sure the sites they point to are still there. Are your prices current? Did you remove that product you no longer sell? Keeping your content current will ensure that your site is optimally positioned for the most relevant search terms.

Keep optimizing

Make sure that the new page you added last week has the correct Meta tags and that text includes targeted keywords. Many people are diligent when they first optimize their sites, but when it comes to adding new pages, they forget that these too need to be optimized.

Use the Google Toolbar

Download the Google Toolbar. This great tool sits alongside your Web browser and has some very useful features. For example, it will show you the PageRank of each site you visit. This is a rank out of ten that indicates how relevant Google thinks the page is. The higher the number, the better ranked the Website is likely to be in Google search results. Using this tool, you can quickly see which of your competitors are doing better than you, and react accordingly.

Check backward links

Check on the links that point to your site. As you know, the quality and quantity of links that point to your Website can affect your search engine position. Using the Google Toolbar, you can view all “backward links” for the Websites you visit. Use this to find all the sites that point to your own Website and make sure they list your site correctly with your targeted keywords in the link text. You can also check on your biggest competitors and see which sites link to them — contact each of these linking sites and see if you can encourage them to link to your site as well.

Keep up the good work

If your site has managed to creep up to top position on the search engines, you can bet you’ve dethroned at least one of your competitors to get there. Do you think they’ll simply sit back and be happy with their lower position and reduced traffic? Of course not.

The reason you wanted to climb up out of search engine obscurity is what will motivate your competition as their site drops down the rankings. This makes maintaining your search engine position a time consuming but equally rewarding process. Out-witting your competition is a big challenge for any business — but one that’s certainly worth the effort.

The suggestions above are by no means exhaustive, but by following them you’ll help ensure that you get to keep the great search engine rankings you worked so hard to achieve. Good luck!

So far, we have looked at using targeted keywords in your domain name and your META tags to improve positioning on the search engines. Now it’s time to turn our attention to the actual text within your Web site. While a good domain name and targeted META tags can help improve search engine rankings, they alone will not help a Web site if it does not contain relevant text on the page being optimized. How important is it to have targeted keywords in the text of your Web site? Let’s consider the extreme. Let’s say you wish to attract customers to your site who are interested in buying computer supplies. You purchase an optimized domain name, research your keywords and optimize your META tags. Then you go and blow it all by creating a Web site that is full of images, very little text and not one mention of computer supplies. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Yet thousands of Web site fall into the trap of building beautiful looking sites that are full of images yet very little text.

Relevancy is the New Buzzword

Most Web site owners spend hours researching META tag formation and search engine submission techniques, but fail to tackle the one thing that can give them multiple benefits. How your site is presented and the text you use can have a dramatic impact on your search engine positioning. Most search engine spiders read the text that is contained on your Web site and use this information when deciding if your site is relevant enough to be displayed in its results. If a search engine scans your Web site and finds no mention of the keyword being searched (in this case, “computer supplies”), it doesn’t matter how great your META tags are, your site will not be displayed at the top of the results. The reason being is search engines like to display Web sites that are as relevant as possible and they figure that if the keyword is mentioned on the page, then the Web site will likely be just what the searcher is looking for. Some search engines even ignore the META tags completely, believing that relevancy can only truly be found by searching the text contained within a Web site (Google being the obvious example of this).

What is also important is to make sure that the text on your Web site makes sense. Don’t just string a whole bunch of keywords together in a hope of proving to the search engines that your Web site is relevant. Not only are the search engines smart enough to recognize keywords on your Web site, but they are also smart enough to determine if they are presented in logical pattern. Repeated keywords back to back on your Web site will simply raise a red flag to the search engines that you are attempting to manipulate your positioning.

Beware of Graphical Text

One last point about the text on your Web site. Make sure that you don’t rely on text that is part of a graphical image. Many Web site designers like to create blocks of text as an image and then place the image on the Web site. While this can look appealing, the search engines cannot read it. All they see is that there is a large image on the Web site taking up space where text should be. The best rule of thumb is to hold the left mouse button and move it over the text on your Web site. If the text becomes highlighted, then the search engines are likely to be able to read it. Graphical text is not necessarily the death of your Web site, but you will need to use compensatory techniques, which we will cover at a later date.

If you are a Web site owner, you have no doubt already learned that it is important to have a good keyword selection when creating your META tags. Keywords are important in determining which users a search engine sends to your Web site, so care should be taken with their selection. OK, so far so good, everything stated above you already knew, right? Well, not really. You see there are still far too many companies out there that feel they should be targeting generic, non-specific keywords. For example, your Web site may sell fine porcelain dolls and obviously you wish to ensure that you get as many people viewing your products as possible. The temptation is to target keywords such as “gifts” or “dolls”, thinking that these terms must get hundreds of thousands of searches each day. Well they do, but two things always happen.

First, the search engine user is displayed a list of millions of companies (search “gifts” at Google and you will get over 11 million results). That is a lot of Web sites to browse through if all you are looking for are fine porcelain dolls. So what happens next? The user goes back to the search box and narrows down their search by using a more targeted search term, in this example, “fine porcelain dolls.”

Now the results are reduced to a few hundred, making it easier for the user to locate the product they want. My point? Generic terms do indeed receive a lot of search requests each month, but they also have the lowest sales conversion rate. That’s because search engine users are becoming more Net savvy and know that they need to be more specific with their keyword searches.

Target, Target, Target

With the above example in mind, think hard about your own keyword selections. Have you fallen into the trap of targeting generic terms such as “gifts”, “books” or “computers”? Ask yourself, Is that what I would search for if I were looking for my product or service? Sit down with your co-workers and think of this from your customer’s perspective. What would they search for if they were looking for you? While it would be nice to be No. 1 for a term such as “gifts”, it’s just not going to happen and if it did, you would be very disappointed with the conversion into sales. Think of two to four-word combinations that relate to the products you sell and instead target these. Trust me, I know it is hard to break away from the single-word selections, but those Web site owners that have done so, have seen a far higher number of targeted visitors to their site and their sales conversions go through the roof.

One Last Thing

I would be hung out to dry by my peers if I finished this article with the impression that all you need are targeted keywords to make your Web site a success. Keyword selections and META tag optimization are very important when promoting your Web site, but they are not the only thing you need to do. Other factors play an important role in your search engine ranking, including Web site layout, page content and inbound links. Targeting the right keywords is just the first step in ensuring great success on the search engines.

As you may have recently read, Yahoo has recently renewed its relationship with Google and will continue to display Google search engine results at Yahoo.com. There had been much speculation as to whether Yahoo would renew this agreement especially as many within Yahoo believed that the Google relationship had already cannibalized much of Yahoo?s audience reach. In fact, Nielsen/Net Ratings recently released new search engine audience figures for the month of August, showing Google?s audience reach barely two points below that of Yahoo?s. With Yahoo already struggling to maintain dominance over MSN, it seemed unlikely that they would renew a relationship with one of their biggest search engine competitors, when options with Inktomi or FAST could fulfill the need without any direct competition. However, when you look at the strength of Google?s name, power of their reputation and quality of their search engine results, you can forgive Yahoo for concluding that maintaining the relationship was the right thing to do. As the saying goes, “Keep you friends close, but your enemies closer”. The big change

So after months of speculation, Yahoo finally announced that they would continue their relationship with Google. The biggest surprise however, is that Yahoo has opted for a strategy that goes beyond merely maintaining the relationship. As of October 10th, Yahoo directory results and Google web pages will no longer be shown separately and will instead be combined to provide new “Web Matches“. These Web Matches will be the combined results of both Yahoo and Google indexes, but displayed using Yahoo?s own algorithm. This combined structure moves away from the previous arrangement whereby Yahoo only displayed Google results when there were no Yahoo directory results for a particular search query. With the new Web Matches, you will no longer see the Google logo appearing in the top left of the screen and the only way you will be able to determine that a result has been drawn from the Yahoo directory, as opposed to Google, will be a link under the listing that reads “More sites about” and a red arrow graphic. This link will allow Yahoo uses to click through to the Yahoo directory to view more websites within the same theme. While the new search results will use a Yahoo algorithm, initial testing has shown that this algorithm is very similar to Google?s own, and in some cases it can be very difficult to see a difference between the order of Yahoo?s results and those of Google.

The impact on your website

So, what does this change mean for anyone looking for high positioning on Yahoo? Well, the biggest question centers on the benefit of paying $299 to be listed in the Yahoo directory. While there are Yahoo users who navigate through the directory of human edited listings, most prefer to use the search function to locate the product or service they are seeking. With this in mind, most companies will be able to utilize the traffic from Yahoo without having to pay the $299 a year that was once the only way of securing any chance of top positioning on the Yahoo search engine results.

So why would anyone continue to pay Yahoo $299 for something they can now obtain simply from being indexed by Google. Well there are a number of benefits for listing directly with Yahoo. First, your listing will display the Yahoo edited description and title, which is often better formatted than the Google results. The Google results will continue to show descriptions based upon the location of the keyword in a website?s text. While this is useful for determining that a website is indeed relevant to the keyword searched, it can often look untidy and click through rates can be lower when Google results are placed next to the clean copy of the Yahoo editors. Secondly, being listed in Yahoo can have a huge positive impact on your positioning within Google. With Google reviewing websites that link to your site, a listing in the Yahoo directory often assists in obtaining higher positioning in Google. Opting out of the Yahoo directory in favor of achieving placement through Google could be detrimental to your ranking in Google. This “catch 22″ situation has not been thoroughly analyzed, but it is likely that by not being listed in the Yahoo directory, you may hinder your chances of being ranked highly at Google and consequently your Yahoo positioning would suffer in the process.

Decisions, Decisions

Yahoo has been testing the new format for their search results for a number of weeks now, and my guess is that they will continue to tweak the format a little more. The full impact of the change will not be evident for at least a few weeks. In the meantime, what strategy should a company undertake? Pay the $299 for a Yahoo directory listing or rely purely on Google? The answer depends on your budget. If your company has a restricted budget, you may wish to wait and see what benefit you receive from Yahoo simply by focusing on your free listing at Google. However, if you have the financial resources, a link in the Yahoo directory will continue to benefit your website and will remove any doubt as to whether your site will show up in the new and improved Yahoo search results.

When tasked with the mission to get your company?s website to the top of the search engine results, it can be down right confusing just trying to understand which methods work, which don?t, and which could have serious repercussions for your business. The following advice will begin a series of articles that will take a look at the more questionable methods that are currently used to obtain prominent search engine visibility.

Over the next few weeks, we will cover some of the more notorious optimization techniques such as cloaking, hidden text and keyword stuffing to name just a few. Today, we begin with the most controversial and the most debated, doorway pages.

A doorway under any other name is still a doorway. Doorway pages, gateway pages, doormat pages, pathway pages are just some of the names used to describe the same technique; building a page for the sole purpose of gaining top search engine positioning and creating traffic for a website.

The variety of aliases for a ?doorway page? provides a clue to the ethics of such a page. By using a different name, the doorway creator (be it the webmaster or SEO) hopes to persuade the website owner that what they are doing is most definitely not a doorway page. But, to paraphrase a well know saying, if it looks like a doorway page and smells like a doorway page then, you guessed it, it?s a doorway page.

What is a doorway page?

Now that we have clarified the different names that are often applied to doorway pages, lets explore exactly why a doorway page can be bad news for any website that utilizes them. First of all, lets look at the definition of a doorway page.

Inktomi, one of the world?s largest providers of search engine results offers a great description in their Content Guidelines:

?[Doorway pages] are pages created deliberately, to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant or poor-quality search results?.

This is a great ?catch all? description of a doorway page, as doorway pages rarely follow the same format, but all have the same desired outcome.

Doorway pages are typically only created to inflate the search engine ranking of a website and are rarely built with useful content or the user experience in mind. Their sole purpose is to provide a page that can be filled with keyword rich text and multiple links back to the main website. Often these pages are not part of the main domain and simply float in cyberspace waiting to attract an unwary search engine spider and force-feed it the inflated content.

A doorway page will often have no graphics, as these would not benefit the optimization of the page, and would use various large fonts and bold text in an effort to highlight the targeted keywords. In essence, a doorway page is spam, and will more than likely lead to more harm than good.

So why are doorway pages spam?

So why is a doorway page considered by many to be spam? If it is so unethical, why do many SEOs still utilize this method? Two great questions that I am often asked when discussing doorway pages with website owners. So lets look at the answers.

First, a doorway page is spam if it?s sole purpose is to manipulate the search engine results without any effort to provide useful content to the visitor who unwittingly lands on it. Some people will argue that a doorway page can be attractive and informative and therefore not spam. I typically respond by challenging the creator of a doorway page to make the content of the actual website attractive and informative rather than building unnecessary pages.

Search engines do not want to spend their time spidering, indexing and inevitably, removing a doorway page from their database. There is no need to create a doorway page, when you can work with the pages of the main website to increase the relevance of that site and consequently improve it?s search engine ranking.

Why are doorway pages still used?

Now let?s look at why many webmasters and SEOs still utilize doorway pages in their optimization efforts. There are two common reasons why doorway pages are still used.

The first reason is that creating a doorway page is quick and easy compared to optimizing the actual website you wish to benefit. Many SEOs have software readily available that, with the touch of a button, creates a keyword dense doorway page ready for uploading to the Internet. With this quick and easy method, it is far cheaper for anyone, webmaster or SEO, to create dozens of doorway pages each designed to increase the traffic of the benefiting website.

Many SEO companies struggle to be profitable in a competitive industry and therefore take the easy route of creating doorway pages. They know that they can make a very good profit if they never actually have to take the time to review the main website and spend hours determining what type of optimization would work well for that particular content.

Like an athlete that takes steroids, they want quick success and are too lazy to put the time and effort into obtaining legitimate results. Unfortunately, like a pumped up Olympian, they run the risk of being banned or penalized for using unethical techniques.

The second reason that doorway pages are still used, is less about laziness and greed but more about ignorance. Before doorway pages were used in proliferation by adult sites, who wanted to trick a searcher for ?computers? into visiting their smutty content, the search engines did not look on their use as spam as they do today. Doorway pages were tolerated and for many years provided a lot of success.

Unfortunately there are still a lot of webmasters and SEOs that have not moved with the times and still believe that doorway pages are effective and safe. I have even spoken to webmasters in charge of obtaining search engine ranking for their company?s website, who have admitted that they simply do not know any other way of optimizing a website, other than creating multiple doorway pages. The ?rules? of search engine optimization are constantly changing and many companies simply cannot keep up with what?s considered acceptable and what?s now classed as spam.

The Search Engines’ View

We have already touched on Inktomi?s view of doorway pages, but many other major search engines have the same tough stance. As many SEOs will claim that doorway pages are not spam, it is important for anyone considering using doorway pages or using a company that implements doorway pages, to hear it direct from the horses mouth.

Here is what the search engines have to say about the use of doorway pages:

• Google: ?Google does not encourage the use of doorway pages. We want to point users to content pages, not to doorways or splash screens.? Content Policy
• Fast/AllTheWeb: ?[we will] exclude Page spam documents from our index or at least disregard links from it when computing static rank? Spam Policy
• Ask Jeeves / Teoma: Defines doorway pages as ?Fabricated pages designed to lead users to other web pages? Spam Restrictions
• AltaVista: ?Trying to fool search engines into including pages that don’t truly match queries, or ranking marginally relevant pages very high on result lists, is one form of spamming?. Combating spamming

Avoid the doorway to disaster

Using doorway pages to enhance the search engine ranking of your website, will not benefit your company in the long-term. While it is tempting to use doorways to gain quick results, inevitably the search engines discover the pages and ban them from their index. Worse still, if you or your SEO create multiple doorway pages, all pointing back to your main website, you run the risk of your own website losing all positioning or being banned completely.

Whether optimizing your website yourself or employing the services of an SEO, the best thing you can do to improve your search engine ranking is to start with the content of your own site. Creating doorway pages to increase your performance will lead you to nothing but disaster.

If you have researched methods for increasing your Web site traffic, there’s no doubt you have come across a lot of information on META Tags. You probably know that they are important for search engine optimization and that they need to be included on your Web site. But what exactly do they do? What is their purpose and how exactly do the search engines interact with them? In this summary of META tags, my intention is not to make your head ache with technical details on correct format and content, but simply explain the purpose of META tags. The three components of META tags are:

• Title
• Description
• Keywords

The Title tag is very similar to the title of a book, it gives a visitor the first hint as to the theme of the Web site. The Description tag is comparable to the summary found on the back of a book, providing a brief guide to the content of your Web site. The Keywords are similar to the index of a book, allowing anyone to clearly see if the Web site contains the information they are seeking. There you go, META tags explained in just three sentences. I could stop right here and you would have a better understanding of META tags than 90 percent of Web site owners. But let’s continue and see how META tags interact with your visitors and the search engines.

Title is Everything

If you only use one component of META tags, then make sure it is the Title tag. The Title tag is important in so many ways. It is the title of your Web site, displayed at the top of every browser window. It is the Title tag that is referenced when a visitor to your site decides to add your location to their favorites or bookmarks. It is also used by all crawling search engines when displaying a link to your Web site. Without the Title tag, your Web site is as likely to be viewed as a book with no cover, sitting in a bookstore with millions of other books.

Description Please

Next in importance is the Description tag. The Description tag is often used by the search engines when displaying your Web site listing. You will usually see the contents of your Description tag shown just below your Web site Title. The Description tag is a brief summary of the contents of your Web site and helps both visitors and search engines to determine the relevancy of your Web site. If your Web site does not have a Description tag or does, but it is poorly worded, you could find that potential visitors pass your company by or even worse, the search engines fail to show your Web site in their results. Consider this, would you buy a book if there were no summary on the back cover explaining what the book was about?

Don’t Forget Keywords

Last, but by no means least, you should ensure that your META tags contain Keywords. While not often seen by visitors to your Web site, they are used by search engines when determining whether your business should be displayed in their results. If a search engine user searches for “widgets”, your site is more likely to be displayed if you include “widgets” as one of your keywords. If you picked up a book and wanted to see if it included information on “widgets” you would turn to the index. If you couldnt find what you wanted then you would be unlikely to buy the book.

Hope It Helps

Hopefully, the above provides a simple explanation of how META tags work. By no means is it technically exact, nor is that what I intnded. In the future, I will go into more detail of how META tags should be formatted and what other factors need to be considered. For now, I felt it important to provide, in laymen’s terms, a summary of how META tags interact with your visitors and the search engines.

 Monday July 14th may very well go down in history as the day that the Search Engine industry grew up and finally gained the respect it so deserved. It was this day that Yahoo announced that in a deal, comprising of $1.63 billion in cash and stock, it had acquired the popular pay-per-click company Overture.

With rumors circulating for some months that Yahoo had built a ?war-chest? and was preparing to make a significant acquisition, investors have been watching and waiting for the Sunnyvale, California based company to make it?s move. With Google increasing it?s audience reach and MSN announcing that it had recently started spidering the web, with the intent of launching a revamped search engine, Yahoo knew that in order to compete in the search engine industry it would have to make a move to increase its arsenal and improve investor confidence.

It appears that this acquisition is just the ticket for Yahoo, with the purchase broadening the company?s focus and increasing advertising revenue from search services, especially in shopping, travel and yellow pages categories. The deal will also provide an audience of more than 88,000 Overture advertisers who will now be encouraged and enticed to purchase the many advertising services already offered by Yahoo. While the deal looks to be a good fit for Yahoo, which needed a new channel to generate additional revenue, and Overture, which has faced fierce competition from other ?pay for performance? companies; is this announcement good for Overture?s customers?

While it is too early to determine the full impact of Yahoo acquiring Overture, there are some concerns already being raised about the future of Overture?s thousands of customers. Overture advertisers have already seen the loss of valuable exposure at AOL and Netscape, with both of those search engines turning to Google?s popular Adwords service for it?s sponsored listings. In addition, Looksmart recently announced a partnership that would see it providing it?s new Looklistings ads to Lycos, which could ultimately replace or at least reduce the impact of the current deal with Overture. With Yahoo now taking over the reins at Overture, there is a definite possibility that MSN will not seek to renew it?s partnership with Overture choosing not to share revenue now that the company is owned by one of their biggest online competitors. If this theory turns into reality, Overture advertisers could see a drop in the amount of traffic they receive with some estimates indicating a 30% reduction in traffic levels. If this hold?s true then it will not only reduce the value of a pay-per-click campaign with Overture, but could also reduce future earnings that Yahoo had hoped to achieve from the deal.

So if buying Overture means that MSN and perhaps other search engines pull the plug on their partnership, is this a bad deal for Yahoo? Actually, not only has Yahoo likely already considered all outcomes from making such an acquisition, it has probably factored in the loss of such large Overture partners such as MSN. However, with the acquisition of Overture?s pay-per-click technology, Yahoo can now offer it?s own advertisers a PPC model that many suspect will ultimately mimic that of Google?s Adwords. No longer having to rely on a third party technology, Yahoo can utilize this valuable advertising model and further improve its revenue, keeping its customers and investors happy. With the recent purchase of Inktomi and it?s crawling technology, Yahoo can now stand against rivals such as Google and MSN and offer a complete package to both the search engine user and search engine advertiser.

There are many directions that Yahoo can now take, with Overture and Inktomi safely under its belt. My personal opinion is that Yahoo will not be able to sustain many of the relationships that Overture has developed over the years. This will be partly due to partners such as MSN not wishing to continue a relationship with a company now owned by a competitor and partly because more and more of Overture?s competitors are developing their own internal pay-per-click or sponsored listing technology. I see a future where, just as Overture planned to use the technology of AltaVista and AllTheWeb for its benefit, Yahoo will in turn use Overture?s technology not to continue down the path of acquiring external partnerships, but to provide Yahoo and it?s advertisers a new opportunity for increasing revenues. Many people will disagree and say that Yahoo can continue to make Overture work and will continue to ad partners. But then the world would be a very boring place if we all agreed now, wouldn?t it?

 Just a few years ago, when asked “How do you drive traffic to your website”, many companies would name banner ads as their main marketing medium for increasing online revenues. In an effort to increase brand awareness, companies spent thousands of dollars on obnoxious banner advertisements on high profile websites in an effort to cement their reputation as the number one company or product in their industry.

It didn’t seem to matter that very few people actually clicked on these flashing, animated billboards. What did matter was Internet users saw these ads wherever they went on the web; there was a sense of pride and vanity from having your company’s banner appear more often than your competitors.

Fast-forward to the present day and banner ads have fallen from grace with few companies buying banner ads purely for the sake of one-upmanship on the competition. In their stead, search engine marketing has become the medium of choice for companies looking to increase website exposure.

With the steady growth of search engine use, thanks in part to the technology and reliability offered by Google, companies already know that obtaining top positioning on the search engines will result in qualified traffic to their website and increased online revenues. However, there is a new phenomenon rising up to replace the battle once seen with banner advertising; Search Engine Vanity.

Search Engine Vanity occurs when a company seeks to obtain number one search engine positioning for the simple purpose of one-upmanship on their competitors. Traffic data, click-thru-rates and conversions are all secondary considerations compared to the desire to ensure that when an Internet user searches for a product or service, their company website is listed above that of their competitors.

Whether it’s Apple and Dell vying for the top ranking for “computers” or Wal-Mart and Netflix battling for the number one spot for the phrase “dvd rental”; these and other companies know that being #1 on the search engines can be vitally important when demonstrating market share to the press or investors.

Companies can spend millions of dollars each year in advertising and branding. A single 60 second Super Bowl ad will cost you over $2 million and have little discernable benefit compared to the same amount spent on a series of ads elsewhere. Yet the prestige offered to a company that advertises during the Super Bowl cannot be denied.

The same holds true when it comes to search engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN. Companies are acutely aware that being highly positioned within these search engine results will strengthen their brand and increase their credibility within their industry.

Take Alaska Airlines as an example, while they had great search engine exposure, with hundreds of search terms listed on the first page of the search engines, they knew that they needed to be in the top spot for “Alaska flights” if they were to solidify their position as the number one airline provider to Alaska. Being somewhere in the first 5 search engine listings, was perfectly adequate to drive traffic to their website, but the prestige of being the very first site listed would have an intangible benefit. By being the number one listed site on Google, Alaska Airlines would immediately position itself as the Google’s favorite, automatically ensuring brand dominance. Number one on the search engines became the equivalent of a Super Bowl ad; your company’s very presence signaled you were the best in your industry.

So are companies throwing money at search engine marketing for the sole purpose of being number one, with little regard to actual traffic and revenues generated? Has Search Engine Vanity taken over from common sense? Yes and no. More and more companies are seeing search engine marketing as the latest trend, something they must do because their competitors are already involved. They fear being left behind and are rushing to secure top positioning for the terms that they believe represent their brand.

A company such as IBM, that has spent many years and millions of dollars to ensure that their name is synonymous with “computers”, knows that the Internet offers a new playing field with different perceptions. In their efforts to secure their brand, it is important that they “own” the term “computers” and hence invest a lot of effort to ensure that ownership is carried over to the search engine results.

However, like most companies you can be sure that IBM knows that the by-product of a number one position on the search engines is increased traffic and sales. With more than 500 million searches being carried out each day, being number one for a generic term or phrase not only increases brand awareness but also increases website traffic and ultimately, revenues. As Penny Oslund, Executive Director, EMBA Programs at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School put it, “we want to ensure that our OneMBA website is positioned above all other business schools to ensure the prestige of our program, the traffic will take care of itself”.

So as search engine marketing becomes a valid and widely adopted marketing medium for companies of all sizes, not being positioned at the top of the listings is something business wish to avoid. Just as companies rushed in the mid 90’s to secure a domain name that reflected their company image or brand, many businesses now seek to ensure that when the average Internet user searches at Google, it is their website that sits at the top of the pile, proudly announcing “Look at me, I am number one”.

At the time of writing this article, Christmas is just eight weeks away. Many stores have their Christmas displays in place, television advertisements are already featuring festive themes and the shopping malls are busily hiring Santa in preparation for the busiest time of the year. Yet despite all the efforts of traditional ?brick and mortar? retailers to boost Christmas sales, a recent Reuters report predicted that online sales will grow by 35% year-on-year to $16.8 billion in the fourth quarter and that retail website sales will kick into gear by December 2nd. That leaves just five weeks to ensure that your website shares in a piece of that $16.8 billion in online sales. If your company hasn?t already made plans to make the most of this years predicted, recording breaking Internet growth, then it may be too late. Most of your competitors have already implemented some kind of search engine strategy and are one step ahead. So what can you do?

Too late for Christmas?

From now until the week before Christmas, you will no doubt see many articles with last minute suggestions for increasing search engine traffic. However, in order to achieve top search engine placement for the Christmas season, you really should have started your campaign many weeks ago. Anything that you attempt now must be implemented with pin-point accuracy and lightning speed if you are to beat the sound of sleigh bells and enjoy increased Christmas sales. For those of you up to the challenge, I have compiled a check-list of things you can do to help increase your website traffic.

1. Are you using paid inclusions?

The typical search engine can take up to six weeks to spider a website and then display it in a fresh index. With this in mind, make sure any new pages you create or optimize, are submitted to the main paid inclusion services. Paid inclusion allows you to buy your way into a search engine and subsequently see your website indexed at a much faster rate, typically within 2-7 days. While this does not offer any promises of better search engine rankings or more traffic, it does allow you to ensure that all of those Christmas specials you?re running are picked up by the search engines now and not sometime in January.

Paid inclusion is rapidly becoming a popular service with many search engines. It allows a website owner to obtain faster indexing, while providing a new revenue stream for the search engines themselves. While there are many options, the main paid inclusion services to consider are:

Positiontech - one of the first, and best, paid inclusion services. Their service allows you to add your most important pages to both Inktomi and AlltheWeb/Lycos partners.

InfoSpider - they have the monopoly on AltaVista?s paid inclusion program. While AltaVista is struggling to return to it?s glory days as one of the best search engines, it is still worth paying the fee to have your most important pages included for Christmas.

Ineedhits - the first company to partner up with Ask Jeeves. Their paid inclusion service is quick and affordable. Within a week, you should see your pages on Ask.com and Teoma.com.

2. Have you updated your content?

I?m sure you have all read that websites that update regularly are likely to attract search engine spiders on a more frequent basis. If your website content has remained the same since Santa last climbed down the chimney, it?s time for a change. Update your site to ensure that your most popular or best-priced products are easy to find from the index page. Add all of your “Christmas specials” and new products. If you have time, go one step further and create new pages that target the items or services that give your company the best profit margins. Two or three highly targeted pages should be on every website owners Christmas list!

3. Custom “404-error” page.

Check with your website host or Webmaster and make sure you have implemented a custom 404 error page. If you?re going to add new products and pages for Christmas, you?ll increase the chances of a visitor stumbling on a page that no longer exists or has been moved. Customized 404 pages are always a good idea, but at this time of the year you can use them to show your Christmas specials. In addition, you can add links to other important pages on your website so that both Christmas shoppers and search engine spiders can navigate their way through the rest of your content.

4. Meta tags - yes you should update them!

While many SEOs believe that Meta tags have lost their value over the years, I believe they can still offer some benefit if you are looking for last minute Christmas traffic. I know, I know; you?ve read many articles that insist that Meta tags are just not worth bothering with anymore, but let me ask you a simple question. How long does it take to change the Meta tags on a page? Weeks? Days? Hours? No, of course not, in just a few minutes you can change the Meta tags on a page to be more targeted and efficient. Compared to building links or changing the content on a page, changing your Meta tags is a piece of (Christmas) cake. And when I say Meta tags, I don?t just mean the ?keywords? tag. Meta tags include the ?Title? and ?Description? tags as well. Forget using dozens of keywords in your Meta tags and be more selective. Focus on the most important keywords for that page. Remember, less is more.

No time to waste.

That should keep you busy. By no means is it an exhaustive list of changes you should make to increase search engine rankings and traffic for Christmas, but it is certainly enough to keep you busy over the next few weeks. And remember, nearly every single website can benefit from the increased traffic this time of the year. While Christmas has obvious benefits for retail websites, most other industries see increased website traffic during the fourth quarter. If you have already implemented an SEO campaign this year, the above fine-tuning should ensure that you have a very merry Christmas.