Search Engines - A Vital Marketing Tool

With well over a billion publicly available pages on the Internet - and still growing fast - most of us are dependent on search engines to find the information we want.

Search engines are a powerful tool - not only useful for finding information that can be valuable to a business, but as a marketing conduit, channeling prospective customers to a site.

A survey conducted by the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US showed that about 85% of Internet users depend on Search Engines to find new web sites. Most visitors only bother to look through the first 20 or 30 search results though before deciding which web site(s) to view. Most searches produce thousands or millions of results. So unless your web site is listed at least within the top 30 returns for a particular keyword or phrase - you're lost!

Getting into that top 30 group is a highly competitive business, and it takes a lot more than just registering with the engines.

Making effective use of search engines as part of a promotional strategy is a fine art. It is essential to optimise your web site to be search engine friendly and then formally register with the engines. You may also choose to use 'doorway' pages to improve your ranking.

An overview of search engines is available here in the form of a discussion paper.

Some Search Tips:

Here's some tips to help you find things more easily:

 Use a dedicated, no frills, engine and avoid time spent down-loading ads and info on other services. Our favourites are Google and Raging Search (see Other Links page).
 For 'difficult' searches set the number of results to be displayed to 50 or 100 - saves time loading pages of only 10 at once.
 If looking for proper names e.g. the White House, use initial capitals, otherwise use lower case.
 Refine keywords to narrow the search as much as possible - e.g. not just 'cars' but try 'cars used Porsche'.
 Use Boolean operators (AND, NOT, OR etc.) to refine a search even further - only available with some engines, e.g. Raging Search, and to lesser extent with Google. E.g. 'jam +fruit -traffic' is better than just 'jam' to find the sweet stuff - and avoids congestion.
 If looking for something that you want available locally - e.g. used cars - try adding location in the search terms. Thus 'used cars London UK' will avoid being overwhelmed by overseas sites.

Definitions:

Search Engine - an automated software device which indexes documents on the WWW. E.g. AltaVista.
Directory - a human compiled catalogue of WWW documents. Entries are assessed and categorised according to human judgements. E.g. Yahoo!