wlindley.com

Many of my clients ask how they can get top listings in the various search engines. Corey Schwartz sums up the problem and the difficulties involved quite well:

Like much of the information on the Internet, much of what you read is half truths and partial information. Manual posting to the search engines is still the best way to go, for a number of reasons.

First, the automated submission services have hundreds of free-for-all sites which basically do nothing but collect your email address and spam you. The link technology at most of the major search engines has become so sophisticated that if it does discover that you’re on a free for all page it’s not unlikely that they will LOWER your ranking, believing that you are trying to spam the search engine.

The basic process to optimize for a search engine is as follows:

• statistically analyze each potential keyword for effectiveness,
• select keywords,
• statistically analyze the pages returned for each keyword,
• build a page for each keyword optimized for each search engine,
• manually submit pages to the engines (1 page per day).

To analyze the keywords pick a search engine, enter the keyword, note down the number of pages returned and use something like the goto.com keyword locater to find the relative number of searches done for that keyword and divide the number of searches by the number of competing pages to come up with an effectiveness index.

In order to achieve decent rankings today you also need to statistically analyze the keyword results at each search engine you want to optimize for and then build pages that mimic those statistics. You’ll need to compute the keyword count and proximity for the title, url, alt areas, body, hyperlinks, etc.,etc.,etc. Don’t forget that you have to do this for each search engine.

Once you have the stats down you’ll have to build a page for each search engine that matches the gathered stats.

It’s a ton of work.