Internet Marketing Strategy and Philosophy

Domain Names and Site Hosting

Like it or not, this step in search engine placement needs an Internet Server Solutions Provider (ISSP) and Internic registration. [An ISP usually does email and connections versus an ISSP that offers full-service site hosting.] As an agent, most consultants can get this process arranged in minutes.

Need More Information on Top Level Domains? - How to Select a Domain

To see if your desired domain name is available, click here.

It is VITAL that you obtain a domain name. If you ever need to change ISSP's, the process of changing registrations with hundreds of directories and search engines is more than a career! And since search engines may register each page in your site, the number of entries increases times the number of pages you have. We strongly suggest that you get a domain name NOW!

As the owner of the site, you can certainly shop for price and features, but at an average monthly cost of under $25 per month, what counts is ONLY how clean the site is (no spam penalties), reliability, speed, and core support services. Even if you have plans to operate on your own computers connected to a high-speed link, this should initially be at an Internet Server Solution Provider (ISSP) facility. It can always be moved.

Ask your Consultant who is the most responsive to their needs. As for obtaining a domain name, this is easy and is available for minimal fees (Registration is between $40 to $70 for two years depending on the service used For serious takers wanting top search engine ranking for competitive terms we require dedicated IP numbers for each URL promoted, raising this fee but worth the investment.

In well over 99 percent of all cases, the owner of the website has never visited their ISSP. Why? Because it isn't cost effective to do that. The ISSP can be anywhere in the world and provide suitable services. And if you don't like the ISSP, change! Our site offers free debugging of your cgi-bin scripts in private cgi-bin libraries as well as unlimited email aliasing and autoresponders.

Now would be a great time to order new stationary and business cards with this updated information. Revise your FAX cover sheet, and perhaps your phone messages once the site is live.

Internet Marketing Through Links (Search Engines, etc)

"Every day over 340 million web users rely on search engines to locate new businesses" -- Financial Times

Before submission you must have prepared your site for search engine placement. If your site is not prepared for top ranking then a submission service can only give you many, many poor rankings.

After revisiting our Search Engine Optimisation Tools page (you absolutely MUST visit this page!), you are ready for your initial placements.

There are many Web businesses offering to list your site with search engines or directories for FREE for some sites, and for a small fee for other sites. The key is that over time, the categories change, the registration format changes, and there is a great difference between being submitted and being registered. At present, there is a 25% mortality rate for search engine sites every few months, and those that survive do so by upgrading categories and registration formats.

Search engine placement requires some homework. Before making this commitment, make a written note with the below information:

1. Your Web address (URL) in the form of "http://www.yoursite.com/"
2. Your email address in the form of "yourname@yoursite.com"
3. The title of your Home Page in the form of "yoursite -products for {need}"
4. A 40 character product description
5. A ten to twelve word site description (your site TITLE probably)
6. A twenty-five word site description
7. A forty word site description (keep in your paste buffer). Consider using this text at the top of the displayed area on your home page.
8. A list of sixteen to twenty words best describing criteria that a prospective visitor would use in a search engine to find your site
9. A complete list of keywords (up to 1000 characters) sequenced with the most important first (possibly from your HTML Keywords line)
10. A one paragraph description of your product(s)
11. Send $10 to the address at the bottom of this page [just kidding - wanted to see if you are still awake].
12. Of course, address, phone number, fax number, and webmaster name.

Important: Before placing your site you need to visit our Search Engine Optimisation Tools page to make sure that your keywords are optimal.

The sequence is to first submit to the major sites by hand. In fact, this is mandatory for a solid search engine placement strategy.

If you intend to do your own search engine placement, then you MUST see our special tool offerings. It is difficult to analyze, let alone understand, the usage of words on a web page. It is hard to generate effective pages that route traffic to your site. And it is at times overwhelming to analyze the overall rankings of your site even with the best position monitors. Isn't it worth an average of $15 per month to have access to tools that make these tasks easier and more effective? Visit our Free tool sampler page to see what we mean.

There is no indication that your search engine placement effort is hurt by frequent submissions, but too often and this may be considered spam. Submit all of them, but one at a time and one per week. Additionally, some of the larger engines are said to be ignoring add requests from "mass submission" sites, although this is not well documented nor confirmed. In fact, this seems to be improbable based upon the data being submitted, but it is possible that the IP address of the submission site is being filtered instead of some item in the data.

As a result, use the Major SE URL Add page for the major engines as needed (not more than once per week), and when using ALL others do not resubmit to the major engines from these other submission tools.

It has been said that 90% of all of your Search Engine visitors originate at one of these major engines. If this is true, then your time is best spent doing hand registration with these major engines and then only doing the other sites when you have free time.

Major SE URL Add page (do this weekly for 4 weeks).

We suggest that you pace yourself, adding only up to five URLs per day as a maximum, and not submitting more than one time per week. As a result, performing the above add requests as scheduled will allow you to remain within the acceptable range for most search engines.

Also note that the engines will regularly discard submissions without processing them. By resubmitting you have a higher probability of having one of your submissions "take". Also, some indexes appear to give preference to "fresh" submissions as determined by the date of last update of the page and the last submission date. So you should update your site often and resubmit at least twice per month.

More than one registration engine (use them in the order presented and definitely use them all) should always be selected and used. It is obvious that they are not identical, and their lists are quite different. In general, you are submitted to award sites, many free-for-all pages (contains thousands of free links), and the top engines. But use them first to spread the word fast, then go back and focus on the big hitters.

At this point it is unclear whether you have already reached the point of diminishing return--where much time spent is time wasted. This is where you should decide to use an inexpensive automated tool or continue with hand submission from "submit page" lists. In almost all cases it is best to browse sites like Eureka! for pages where you could hand-submit your site.

After placing your site, use the SEOToolSet™ to see how well you have done. This handy set of tools will use your search criteria to determine your position in search responses. Since some search engines take weeks to add your link, don't be surprised if you don't get listed for the top twelve engines. We would use this on a regular basis to make sure things haven't changed while you weren't looking.

Please review our pages on Pay per Click (PPC) search engines and how they contribute to this area.

An additional source of links comes from Award programs and Reviews. Such programs require the same information as the above links, they take time, many are useless but a few are great, and they are harder to find than just about anything on the Web. It may take a while to win yourself a few awards, but they are certainly available to those willing to invest the time.

Note that a link like:

http://click.hotbot.com/director.asp?id=1&target=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ebruceclay%2Ecom%2Fweb_rank%2Ehtm&query=search+engine+Search Engine Optimisation&rsource=LCOSWF

does not count in the search engines as a direct link, although it may actually bring the visitor to your page. You will not receive credit for having this link though. Simply put: such links do not contribute to the popularity of your site. This type of link is commonly found in search engine results pages and in third-party affiliate programmes.

A handy tool for checking your Reciprocal link counts is linkpopularity.com. It gives you a very quick count of your links in AltaVista, Google, and HotBot. Clicking on the counts gives you the specific links. Click here to see our link counts.

It is worth mentioning Webrings as a source of traffic. Sites are "joined" into a link that allows visitors to your site to visit similar sites. Although a webring may increase traffic via Webring visitors to your site, there is no evidence that this is significant traffic. Join carefully, since this is as much of a path leading away from your site as a path leading to your site. I recommend that you not participate in webrings unless there is evidence that this is a significant traffic source.

Internet Marketing Through Public Relations.