For businesses that market wholly or partially online, it may
seem that three words are the only way to get more customers:
search engine optimization (SEO). Typically, the search engines
being referred to are: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. These three
engines have almost become interchangeable with the phrase "do a
search", so much so that the word "Google" has entered the
English lexicon as "find information".
There are actually hundreds of search engines, not just the Big
Three (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) that many Internet users think of.
By focusing only on the most well known search engines for your
online marketing strategy, you may be missing out on as much as
30% of the billions of searches being done online every single
day. While not the oldest search engine on the internet, Google does
have the reputation of being the granddaddy. However, it is worth
investigating alternative search engines - niche engines,
meta-search engines, and human-powered engines. Niche search engines focus their searches on a particular subject
matter, such as blogs (http://www.blog-search.com) or articles
(http://www.goarticles.com). Meta-search engines compile results
from multiple search engines (http://www.dogpile.com,
http://www.widow.com). Finally, human-powered search engines are
composed of directory pages with link and general information,
put together by humans who search for the most relevant content
(http://www.mahalo.com, http://www.dmoz.org). These alternative
search engines tend to have pretty high page ranks, which give
more credence to the fact that online marketers shouldn't
overlook them. There is also the fact that some Internet searchers do not want
to use Google because of personal or political views. Because of
Google's popularity, it can (incorrectly) be perceived as having
a monopoly on the search engine market. That perception, combined
with opposition to a seemingly growing "corporate world", turns
off some potential customers and eliminates your potential to
reach them, if you focus only on Google or other big search
engines. As part of SEO, using keywords to bring in consumers is all the
rage. Businesses spend a great deal of time and money researching
keywords, keyword density, and effects on page rankings in
results lists. Guess what? It's not only a pain for the
businesses to constantly be looking for which words may get them
more hits and higher rankings; it's quickly becoming over done. Consumers are fatigued with seeing keyword-loaded articles and
websites tagged with anything that could possibly be related to
their search terms. This online marketing strategy may make sense
in the short-term, but chances are good that by the time the
strategy is perfected by your marketers, there will be a
different trend altogether that needs to be learned. Marketing
with the intent to only increase your page rankings, by any means
necessary, is only a quick fix and could be quite expensive.
SEO tactics are starting to turn customers off. If SEO is the
main priority of a marketing campaign and keyword-dense content
was the impetus for the customer finding the website, this hurts
the site's credibility with the consumer. Perhaps they'll buy
from you once because you showed up at the top of the results
page, but will they remember you next time or just do another
search? Another concern with search engines is the program spiders that
crawl the Internet, looking for relevant pages for search
results. Even the largest of the search engines can only cover a
portion of the internet. According to Wikipedia, no search engine
can search more than 16% of the net!
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spidering) In addition, the spiders have a massive amount of searching to
do, which can be a slow and taxing process on the sites they are
crawling. By the time a spider finishes crawling the Internet,
the information collected can be outdated - pages and links have
either been deleted or new information added. Spiders are
certainly not a perfect means of finding good results with one
search engine.
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Bill Platt has been helping online marketers promote their online
businesses since 2001, through http://www.thephantomwriters.com
By using article marketing to promote his business online, he
has always been able to generate lots of traffic from inside and
outside of the search engines. In 2007, his website generated
125,000 visitors from non-search sources and 119,000 visitors
from 59 search engines. Learn Bill's secrets - get his ebook:
http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-traffic.html
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