| Every day, Web users go to Google or Yahoo! and enter keywords in hopes of finding the ideal Web destination to meet their needs. Once upon a time, this would give you a short list of related Web sites that at least appeared to be related to your search. Today, with millions of Web sites and billions of Web pages on the Internet, searches often produce thousands of possible matches.
A few short years ago, a business could get a pretty good ranking on a search engine by paying a little attention to the HTML keywords on their Web site and submitting free listing requests to the search directories, like Yahoo!, Google, MSN and others. In a few weeks, the site would appear and traffic to the site would begin to increase.
Those days are over.
Businesses who want and need favorable rankings in search engines (and who doesn’t, considering that search engines bring more traffic to sites than any other medium) are now spending money for "search engine optimization (SEO)" services and keyword advertising. Like most good things on the Internet, easy accessibility to on-line customers is now coming with a cost.
There is an undeclared war on the Net. The search directories want to provide users with the most relevant results, and Web site owners want to be listed higher than their competitors, regardless of the true relevancy or quality of their site. Search sites are constantly changing the rules by which they rank sites. The common methods of keyword "meta-tags" and the like are often being ignored by complex analyses of page content, image names, and other aspects which search sites keep secret to the rest of us. Add this to the fact that creating a high ranking for all keywords for a site is almost impossible, especially if the keyword is broad, such as "boats" or "real estate."
This battle has created a rapidly emerging industry of Search Engine Optimization specialists. SEO firms – for a fee, of course – analyze a Web site, add coding or changes where necessary, submit sites to search directories, and monitor the results. Good SEO firms spend a great deal of time analyzing search directories to determine what works and doesn’t work with each one. What produces a top-10 ranking in Google might not work with MSN. And it's common to find that a site that ranked high in Google last month doesn't show up in the top-25 this month. This arbitrary re-ranking of sites produces endless disappointments for Web site owners, as for years we all were used to getting free submissions to search directories. While most will still take submissions free, we’re now paying SEO firms to help us improve site rankings.
Search directories – and let's take Google as the primary example here – have employed additional services to help Web site owners get better exposure for their Web sites. Google's Ad Words allows sites to pay "per-click" amount for small ads based on the keywords chosen. It's somewhat complex to set up – you might be better served to consult a professional – but in short, you create a two-line ad, then select one or more keyword phrases. Then you choose how much you are willing to pay for each person who actually clicks on your ad in order to go to your Web site. The higher you agree to pay, the higher your actual ranking among the other Ad Word ads will be.
I like this methodology, as it allows us to be quite specific with our keywords, which also means that we don't have to pay as much to achieve a higher ranking. For example, we manage a real estate Web site – www.tigrett.com - for a firm in Port O’Connor, Texas. We created six keyword ads for Google, and agree to pay as much as $.25 for each "click-through" (we pay nothing for the ad to simply appear). For "Port O’Connor Real Estate," our ad for Tigrett generally appears in the number one spot on the right side of the Google results, because of the amount we're willing to pay and the fact that his ad gets clicked on frequently.
Long gone are the days of free, mass submissions to search directories. To successfully compete, you have to be creative, aggressive, and budget promotion dollars. It doesn't have to be expensive, but it isn't free anymore.
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