Editor’s Corner:
Search Engines: Rulers of the Domain

With the Web getting bigger and more unwieldy each day, chances are that your web site is not at the top of the list on most search engines. In fact if you go to Did-it.com or WebPromote.com you’ll find free services that will tell you if your site is within the first two hundred sites an engine would display after a search on keywords you select.

For most of us, it’s going to be disappointing to go through this exercise. Since there are automated "spiders" that crawl the web and index all the content they find, you should appear in an AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos, Northern Lights or Webcrawler search. Those engines are "spider-driven." But if your site has frames or your server blocks spiders’ entry, you won’t find yourself in these engines.

META Tags can possibly improve the way you are listed. A Meta Tag has a few simple lines of HTML text that are placed at the very top of your site.These words don’t display on your screen when you view your site but greet every spider with an intense barrage of words that describe your site’s content. Meta tags will help your site to be indexed properly but they will not necessarily put your site at the head of list.

In discussions with other web marketers I’m told that the search engines change their lisitng priorities and suddenly all the work you’ve done to work with each engine has to be redone.

Keeping up with search engines sounds more like a "nerdy" challenge than a marketing challenge. Your average business webmaster isn’t able to keep up with the complexities of these search engines. I recommend that you have your webmaster visit http://www.searchenginewatch.com. There is so much coverage on that site on the topic, it’s staggering.

What seems to work best is purchasing or renting keywords from different engines so that when someone types in "overnight delivery," for example, a Federal Express banner ad comes up. Hopefully the searcher will click through on the banner and land on the advertiser’s site, leaving all the search results behind him.

I’m thoroughly convinced that most of us in the content arena are in the wrong business. Instead of clamoring to get listed properly or renting the right keyword, just start cataloging and indexing your own industry. People will come banging at your door for sure, with money in their hands.