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There are many hurdles that you must clear for a successful ecommerce business. There is stiff competition and you will need to do some kind of search engine promotion for top search engine positions. Remember, you are a small fish in a big sea. One of the most inexpensive ways is by using the search engines to promote your site. Here's a way to improve your search engine positions and send hundreds and even thousands of visitors to your web store everyday.
There is a pervasive myth among web site managers that simply submitting your
web site to hundreds of search engines will increase traffic to your web store. Another myth is
that simply inserting META tags in your Web pages will also increase your traffic. Both
are just not true. So what works? Search engine positioning that is by far your
best and most affordable bet.
Consider these statistics: Over 95% of Web users find what they are looking for
by visiting the top 6 search engines. Yahoo alone handled over 55 million searches and
page views in December 1997. Many of these searches are for the products and services that
you deal in, guaranteed! Everybody knows that even a few good positions on even one or two
important keywords or phrases can drive thousands or hundreds of thousands of quality
visitor traffic to a Web site per day. Research has shown that people hardly ever go past
the top 30 search results for any one search. The top 10 results receive 78% more traffic
than those in position 11 to 30 do. The top 30 results get over 90% of the search traffic.
This alone explains why some sites do so well and others so disappointingly, and why it is
so critical to be ranked highly.
So how do you position your web site at the top of search engine results? Use
doorway pages. Doorway pages, also known as entry or bridge pages, are Web pages designed
specifically to rank highly on the unique ranking algorithms of each search engine. The
two best things about using doorway pages is that they cost far less than other
promotional tools such as banner ads, and they work better when properly designed. There
are two ways to go about creating doorways. You can either do it yourself or have someone
do it for you.
If you decide to do it yourself, be prepared to invest a considerable amount of
time on them - beating the search engine algorithms is not an easy matter! You should also
be prepared to make a number of doorway pages. You must make one doorway page per keyword
or keyword phrase that you want to be positioned well in. For best results, depending on
your sites subject matter, you should target 10 to 50 keywords and keyword phrases.
Usually, a page that ranks well on one engine may not rank well on other engines. Assuming
that you want to make sure that you are ranked highly on the five top engines (AltaVista,
HotBot, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite Yahoo does not accept doorway pages), you have
to make five versions of each doorway page, each optimized for a particular engine.
Knowing what it takes to make effective doorway pages is not hard . First, you have to realize that ranking criteria varies from search engine to
search engine. Most evaluate the placement of keywords or keyword phrases on various parts
of your pages based simultaneously on all these criteria:
- Prominence of the keyword searched how early in a page a keyword appears.
- Frequency of the keyword searched number of times the keyword appears. Be
careful about this. Simply repeating the keyword will not work because grammatical
structure and keyword weight also plays a role.
- Site Popularity a few search engines consider how popular your site is
when ranking.
- "Weight" of the keywords that is the ratio of keywords to all
other words. Each search engine has a threshold. If your page crosses that threshold, the
engine labels it as spam and ignores it.
- Proximity of keywords how close together the keywords are to each other,
especially when the item searched for is a phrase.
- Keyword Placement these are the locations where an engine will look for
the keyword, e.g. in the body, title, META tags, etc.
- Grammatical structure some engines consider grammar in their calculations.
They do this to make it harder for spammers to do their thing.
- Synonyms some engines look for words similar in meaning to the keyword.
As you can see, the ranking criteria is highly dynamic, using a complex
algorithm that integrates all the above factors in various proportions and with various
maximum and minimum values. An important criteria to look deeper into is the keyword
placement criteria. These are the various places that engines look for keywords:
 | Keywords in the <TITLE> tag(s) |
 | Keywords in the <META NAME="DESCRIPTION"> |
 | Keywords in the <META NAME="KEYWORD"> |
 | Keywords in <H1> or other headline tags |
 | Keywords in the <A
HREF="http://yourcompany.com/page.htm"></A> link tags |
 | Keywords in the body copy |
 | Keywords in ALT tags |
 | Keywords in <!-- insert comments here> comments tags |
 | Keywords contained in the <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN"
NAME="HIDDEN" VALUE="include list of keywords here"> the hidden
type tag. |
 | Keywords contained in the URL or site address, e.g.,
http://www.keyword.com/keyword.htm |
To fully cover the process of figuring out the parameters of each criteria for
each search engine is beyond the scope of this article. Put simply, there are several ways to come up with doorway pages, depending
on the resources at your disposal. What you would need to do if you were doing this
manually would be to do a search on a keyword or phrase in a search engine. See what page
ranks highest for that keyword. Make sure that the actual page is the same one displayed
in the search results and not a redirected page. Then meticulously inspect that page and
create a doorway page that beats that page on all the above criteria, without going too
far as to cross the engines thresholds. You would, for example, make sure that your
keyword or phrase appears in all the places that it does in the page you are studying, and
it does so just a little more often, and in a weight just a fraction of a percentage point
higher. Another thing to keep in mind is that most search engines seems to favor shorter
pages, meaning that you should try to achieve the above with a page that is slightly
shorter than the current top ranking one.
If you want to save yourself all this hassle and get your pages done by someone
else, just find a reputable positioning company or consultant. Currently, there isn't that
many, so the fees charged for this service can vary widely, so can the service and
results. There are three types of places you could go to. You could go to a consultant
expect to pay up to $3000 for that! Or you could use one of the online services
such as Did It or Green Flash. Did It charges $299 for set up for 4 keywords or phrases,
plus $0.25 per hit on the doorway page. Green Flash has no set up fees, rather a minimum
order size, plus $0.25 to $2.00 per hit on the doorway page. For a lot of webmasters, that
is too high a price to pay, considering that 1000 visitors could end up costing you up to
$2,000. If you are just setting up a website and need help promoting then please email us and we will do our best to help at a reasonable cost.
Owning your own domain name is critical to a successful ecommerce venture and we'll be happy to register your domain for you at no extra charge. If you need help just email us and we will assist you. Please use the handy utility below to check the availability of domains. We are an official Network Solutions Partner.
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