Not only is it important for your business to have a website, use it as a marketing tool, and update it regularly… it’s also important to find ways to get your site noticed. An obvious ways of doing that is to add your website address on all of your marketing materials. Don’t forget! It’s as important as your phone number.
Another important way to get traffic on your site is to make sure it gets listed on the major search engines. Since I started doing web design, I’ve come to realize that search engine logistics is about as interesting and easy to understand to me as organic chemistry or nuclear physics. Which, if you’re wondering, is NOT AT ALL. It’s a science, but not necessarily a consistent one. BUT, there is hope on the horizon. Here are some basic facts about search engines that you may not know but could be helpful if you did.
1. At first, it seems like there are SO MANY search sites out there (like Google, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, HotBot, Dogpile, Ask.com, Netscape, Earthlink, etc.) on which you should try and rank high. The good news is that only a few of them are necessary to worry about.
2. Google gets 53% of all searches performed in the U.S. … thus we can conclude that it’s an important one… THE important one.
3. Yahoo! gets 19% and MSN 12%.
4. The rest are 5% or lower.
(this is all according to some research and a lot of reading I’ve done lately on the subject)
5. Another interesting thing to note (especially if you’ve been attacked by companies promising to get you listed on the hundreds of search sites out there), is that many of the smaller search engines and directories get their information FROM Google or the Open Directory Project… AOL.com and MyWebSearch are a couple examples.
6. Ask.com has it’s own engine and feeds many of the smaller ones like Lycos and Excite.
7. So, just from this tiny bit of info it can be concluded that there are really only four main search engines to worry much about: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask… the Open Directory Project is important too. In my next entry I’ll talk about what to do to get on them… OH, that’s what you were hoping for in this entry wasn’t it? Stay tuned!
