This is the last installment of a three part series looking at the realities of doing business on the Net. In week one, we looked at the big picture of e-business and it's real promise for the future. Last week, we examined some of the options available to site owners for attracting new visitors to their website. This week, we look at the two most effective options for bringing these visitors into your web, a strong link network and high positioning on search engines.

In the last NetProfit, I made the comment that the most effective methods for bringing qualified traffic to your site often cost nothing but your time. This week, we'll look at the two methods that have consistently ranked highest in survey after survey asking browsers how they find new websites. And both of them, with a few exceptions, take some time but don't cost a dime.

The Psychology of the Web

One of the strange quirks of browsers on the web that has caused the ad managers and shareholders of the many portal sites no small amount of frustration is that we don't appear to like paid advertising on the web. If one looks at the top ways we find new sites, the sources that appear to be free and unbiased rank far higher that any of the paid options.

Image explaining methods of finding new sites

As you can see from this chart, unpaid methods of finding new sites (friends, links from other www pages, search engines and directories) are substantially ahead of paid options like printed and tv ads. All the ad banners, pop up windows and sponsorship links are left to split up a very small pie consisting of the remaining few percent. And, right on top of the list, are links from other sites and search engines.

Building a Better Link Network

One of the best ways to drive traffic to you is by establishing a strong network of links to your site. Not only is this a great way to build traffic, it will also give you a huge head start when you start positioning your site on the search engines.

So, how do you build those links? First of all, do some investigative work on the web and compile a list of likely sites that may find your site interesting. These can include industry or regional specific directory or portal sites, e-zines (online magazines), the sites of complementary but not competing businesses, professional association sites and more. By using the search engines to search for keyword phrases specific to your industry, you can quickly see which other sites might be a prospective link source for you. Remember, if you're looking at these links as ranking boosters for search engines, the more relevant the content on the page that contains the link pointing to you, the better. Once you've identified the sites, it's a matter of contacting the webmaster, introducing yourself and your site and inquiring if they'd be interested in trading links with you.

A word of advice here. Often sites have a links page where they simply include a long list of links to other sites. Although having a link on this page is better than nothing, you'd get far more out of having a link in the middle of a good content page that's talking about the product or service you offer.

You might want to consider supplying the site with some editorial content that they can post on their site, complete with a link back to you. Informative, objectively focused articles can be very well received by other site owners and the editors of content rich sites that focus on your industry.

Finally, there are link exchange programs where you can submit your site and have a link to your site appear on hundreds of other sites which are also part of the exchange network. While this may seem like a quick and easy way to build links, we've found in the past that very little traffic is generated from these links and they have virtually no effect on search engine rankings. The other drawback is that due to the automated nature of the networks, your link on these other sites may only last for a week or so.

I've been Searching for a g-URL like You

Now, we come to a topic intimately familiar to me, how to get your site to the top of those search engine and directory rankings. A search engine positioning program can drastically increase the numbers of qualified visitors finding your site. If you're interested in the actual mechanics of positioning and how we do it, I'd suggest checking out some of the articles on our site (Hype vs Myth of Positioning, Why Worry About Positioning and Picking Keywords). For this column, we'll confine ourselves to talking about which search engines and directories you should be concerned about and how you can submit your site to them. So here, ranking in order of importance as a source of traffic, are the major places where we submit sites. Remember, many of these submission sites will result in rankings on many different engines. By the way, the percentages of total search engine traffic shown are an average based on the visitor logs of our clients.

Yahoo

Yahoo is like the 800 pound gorilla who's ringing your doorbell. It's not wise to ignore it. When it comes to generating search engine traffic, Yahoo stakes a unshakable claim to 31% of it, with approximately 21% of this coming from Yahoo's human edited directory and the remained coming from the Google powered spider based "web pages" engine. While Yahoo is the search engine of choice for newcomers to the Net and so tends to draw a less technically sophisticated user, it's sheer numbers make it a must for any guerilla e-marketer.

Yahoo offers a business express submission which is mandatory on the main site for commercial and business sites, and is an option for many other categories in the US, Canada and the UK. The Express Submission costs $199 and guarantees that a Yahoo editor will come and review your site within 10 business days. It doesn't guarantee you'll be included, but if you carefully review the criteria for inclusion before you try, the odds are in your favor.

How important is being included in the directory? When we had our own site included and rank well for two of our main keyword phrases, it meant an immediate doubling of our traffic. It was the best 200 dollars we ever spent. But, because of their importance, submissions to Yahoo should be handled carefully. We work very closely with clients to make sure this important step is done correctly, because if it isn't, it can be very difficult to fix after the fact.

Google

The second most important source of search engine traffic is the relatively new search tool, Google. This is largely due to Google's agreement with Yahoo, which sees this engine providing back up search results for Yahoo's human edited directory. Between Yahoo and Google's own site, this engine accounts for 20% of all search engine traffic. Google's users tend to be more experienced and technically sophisticated web users, making it a good choice for targeting business-to-business traffic.

Google is a spider based engine, which means you can submit your main pages through the submit URL page and Google's spider will visit and crawl it's way through your site, including the pages found in it's index. There's no cost for submission to Google, although they are testing out a paid advertising program in addition to their free search results. I'd stick to the free option for now. By the way, having many relevant, high quality sites link to yours will give you a big boost in Google.

AltaVista

AltaVista is one of the venerable veterans of the search engine biz, and, like Google, tends to attract a fairly sophisticated user. It accounts for about 17% of all search engine traffic.

AltaVista is also a spider based engine which doesn't charge for inclusion in it's index. Submit your main page to Scooter, AltaVista's spider, and let it find the rest of your pages. Link popularity (how many sites like to yours) is a big factor on AltaVista as well.

Inktomi

Inktomi is also a spider based engine that's a search engine for hire. Their index can be found partnered on a number of sites, including AOL, HotBot, Looksmart, Netscape and Goto. Add up all the Inktomi powered sources of search engine traffic and you'll end up with about 13% of the pie. By the way, Inktomi offers both a free submission URL (in this case, the submit URL for Canada.com) and a paid option that guarantees reindexing of the page every 48 hours. For more about Inktomi's paid submission program, see the November 7 NetProfit.

Open Directory Project

The Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org) is owned by Netscape and was formed to give Yahoo a run for it's money. The volunteer edited directory is the backbone of many directories on the Net and can be seen on Netscape, Hotbot, Lycos and Direct Hit. The submission process is similar to Yahoo's, but is free. It's tough to estimate how much traffic comes from Open Directory, because of the ways the results are shown, but we estimate it to be about 10% of total search engine traffic.

LookSmart

LookSmart is another human edited directory that is quite similar to Yahoo, right down to the $199 Express Submission (LookSmart guarantees a review within two days). As a source of traffic, LookSmart has taken giant strides with it's partnership agreements with AltaVista, MSN and Excite, where it provides directory listings. Because of the hybrid nature of the results on these sites, it's again difficult to estimate the percentage of traffic, but we're putting down LookSmart as 10% as well.

Go Network

Disney's revamped search portal is still an independent player, with it's own Go Guides Directory and search index. While the numbers aren't huge for Go as a potential traffic source (about 4%), the way Go Guide entries are prominently displayed on the site give them great click through rates. For our site, Go is second biggest source of search engine traffic, right behind Yahoo.

Last Words

If you are interested in search engine positioning, you have two choices: do it yourself or hire somebody to do it for you. If you choose the second route, here's three articles to read over. As a firm offering search engine optimization services, we think these articles give you some great guidelines to help you make your decision.

http://clickz.com/cgi-bin/gt/article.html?article=2819
http://ehits.com/AskVicki/090800/
http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt4/990301outsource-positioning.htm

This is the last installment of a three part series looking at the realities of doing business on the Net. In week one, we looked at the big picture of e-business and it's real promise for the future. Last week, we examined some of the options available to site owners for attracting new visitors to their website. This week, we look at the two most effective options for bringing these visitors into your web, a strong link network and high positioning on search engines.

In the last NetProfit, I made the comment that the most effective methods for bringing qualified traffic to your site often cost nothing but your time. This week, we'll look at the two methods that have consistently ranked highest in survey after survey asking browsers how they find new websites. And both of them, with a few exceptions, take some time but don't cost a dime.

The Psychology of the Web

One of the strange quirks of browsers on the web that has caused the ad managers and shareholders of the many portal sites no small amount of frustration is that we don't appear to like paid advertising on the web. If one looks at the top ways we find new sites, the sources that appear to be free and unbiased rank far higher that any of the paid options.

As you can see from this chart, unpaid methods of finding new sites (friends, links from other www pages, search engines and directories) are substantially ahead of paid options like printed and tv ads. All the ad banners, pop up windows and sponsorship links are left to split up a very small pie consisting of the remaining few percent. And, right on top of the list, are links from other sites and search engines.

Building a Better Link Network

One of the best ways to drive traffic to you is by establishing a strong network of links to your site. Not only is this a great way to build traffic, it will also give you a huge head start when you start positioning your site on the search engines.

So, how do you build those links? First of all, do some investigative work on the web and compile a list of likely sites that may find your site interesting. These can include industry or regional specific directory or portal sites, e-zines (online magazines), the sites of complementary but not competing businesses, professional association sites and more. By using the search engines to search for keyword phrases specific to your industry, you can quickly see which other sites might be a prospective link source for you. Remember, if you're looking at these links as ranking boosters for search engines, the more relevant the content on the page that contains the link pointing to you, the better. Once you've identified the sites, it's a matter of contacting the webmaster, introducing yourself and your site and inquiring if they'd be interested in trading links with you.

A word of advice here. Often sites have a links page where they simply include a long list of links to other sites. Although having a link on this page is better than nothing, you'd get far more out of having a link in the middle of a good content page that's talking about the product or service you offer.

You might want to consider supplying the site with some editorial content that they can post on their site, complete with a link back to you. Informative, objectively focused articles can be very well received by other site owners and the editors of content rich sites that focus on your industry.

Finally, there are link exchange programs where you can submit your site and have a link to your site appear on hundreds of other sites which are also part of the exchange network. While this may seem like a quick and easy way to build links, we've found in the past that very little traffic is generated from these links and they have virtually no effect on search engine rankings. The other drawback is that due to the automated nature of the networks, your link on these other sites may only last for a week or so.

I've been Searching for a g-URL like You

Now, we come to a topic intimately familiar to me, how to get your site to the top of those search engine and directory rankings. A search engine positioning program can drastically increase the numbers of qualified visitors finding your site. If you're interested in the actual mechanics of positioning and how we do it, I'd suggest checking out some of the articles on our site (Hype vs Myth of Positioning, Why Worry About Positioning and Picking Keywords). For this column, we'll confine ourselves to talking about which search engines and directories you should be concerned about and how you can submit your site to them. So here, ranking in order of importance as a source of traffic, are the major places where we submit sites. Remember, many of these submission sites will result in rankings on many different engines. By the way, the percentages of total search engine traffic shown are an average based on the visitor logs of our clients.

Yahoo

Yahoo is like the 800 pound gorilla who's ringing your doorbell. It's not wise to ignore it. When it comes to generating search engine traffic, Yahoo stakes a unshakable claim to 31% of it, with approximately 21% of this coming from Yahoo's human edited directory and the remained coming from the Google powered spider based "web pages" engine. While Yahoo is the search engine of choice for newcomers to the Net and so tends to draw a less technically sophisticated user, it's sheer numbers make it a must for any guerilla e-marketer.

Yahoo offers a business express submission which is mandatory on the main site for commercial and business sites, and is an option for many other categories in the US, Canada and the UK. The Express Submission costs $199 and guarantees that a Yahoo editor will come and review your site within 10 business days. It doesn't guarantee you'll be included, but if you carefully review the criteria for inclusion before you try, the odds are in your favor.

How important is being included in the directory? When we had our own site included and rank well for two of our main keyword phrases, it meant an immediate doubling of our traffic. It was the best 200 dollars we ever spent. But, because of their importance, submissions to Yahoo should be handled carefully. We work very closely with clients to make sure this important step is done correctly, because if it isn't, it can be very difficult to fix after the fact.

Google

The second most important source of search engine traffic is the relatively new search tool, Google. This is largely due to Google's agreement with Yahoo, which sees this engine providing back up search results for Yahoo's human edited directory. Between Yahoo and Google's own site, this engine accounts for 20% of all search engine traffic. Google's users tend to be more experienced and technically sophisticated web users, making it a good choice for targeting business-to-business traffic.

Google is a spider based engine, which means you can submit your main pages through the submit URL page and Google's spider will visit and crawl it's way through your site, including the pages found in it's index. There's no cost for submission to Google, although they are testing out a paid advertising program in addition to their free search results. I'd stick to the free option for now. By the way, having many relevant, high quality sites link to yours will give you a big boost in Google.

AltaVista

AltaVista is one of the venerable veterans of the search engine biz, and, like Google, tends to attract a fairly sophisticated user. It accounts for about 17% of all search engine traffic.

AltaVista is also a spider based engine which doesn't charge for inclusion in it's index. Submit your main page to Scooter, AltaVista's spider, and let it find the rest of your pages. Link popularity (how many sites like to yours) is a big factor on AltaVista as well.

Inktomi

Inktomi is also a spider based engine that's a search engine for hire. Their index can be found partnered on a number of sites, including AOL, HotBot, Looksmart, Netscape and Goto. Add up all the Inktomi powered sources of search engine traffic and you'll end up with about 13% of the pie. By the way, Inktomi offers both a free submission URL (in this case, the submit URL for Canada.com) and a paid option that guarantees reindexing of the page every 48 hours. For more about Inktomi's paid submission program, see the November 7 NetProfit.

Open Directory Project

The Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org) is owned by Netscape and was formed to give Yahoo a run for it's money. The volunteer edited directory is the backbone of many directories on the Net and can be seen on Netscape, Hotbot, Lycos and Direct Hit. The submission process is similar to Yahoo's, but is free. It's tough to estimate how much traffic comes from Open Directory, because of the ways the results are shown, but we estimate it to be about 10% of total search engine traffic.

LookSmart

LookSmart is another human edited directory that is quite similar to Yahoo, right down to the $199 Express Submission (LookSmart guarantees a review within two days). As a source of traffic, LookSmart has taken giant strides with it's partnership agreements with AltaVista, MSN and Excite, where it provides directory listings. Because of the hybrid nature of the results on these sites, it's again difficult to estimate the percentage of traffic, but we're putting down LookSmart as 10% as well.

Go Network

Disney's revamped search portal is still an independent player, with it's own Go Guides Directory and search index. While the numbers aren't huge for Go as a potential traffic source (about 4%), the way Go Guide entries are prominently displayed on the site give them great click through rates. For our site, Go is second biggest source of search engine traffic, right behind Yahoo.

Last Words

If you are interested in search engine positioning, you have two choices: do it yourself or hire somebody to do it for you. If you choose the second route, here's three articles to read over. As a firm offering search engine optimization services, we think these articles give you some great guidelines to help you make your decision.

http://clickz.com/cgi-bin/gt/article.html?article=2819
http://ehits.com/AskVicki/090800/
http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt4/990301outsource-positioning.htm