We Keep You Ahead of the Competition

WEB site design, development, and implementation are only a portion of the services that we offer. In fact, they are only a precursor to the most important aspect of WEB advertising, Site visibility.

Would it make good business sense to have an advertising firm create a killer advertisement and never run it in the paper? Wouldn't get much of a response that way, would you? The same applies to site marketing. Search engines are the magazines and newspapers of the Internet serving as the onramp to this world.

Search engines are among the most effective means of promoting your web site. These engines help users find information in the ever-expanding ocean of web sites. The most recent statistics show that 90% of Internet users have used a search engine and 63% regularly use one or more. This illustrates just how important it is to market your site with these search engines. Six of the ten most popular sites on the Internet are search engines – pulling in over ten million hits a day! Search engines owe their success to two main factors:

• They are the easiest way of getting around the Web, which contains a complex, rapidly increasing number of sites.
• They are free, both for the user who makes the search and for the site owners who insert their sites in the database.

So Many Engines, So Little Time

There are over 1,800 Search Engines throughout the world. Companies in the United States run most of them. To register your site, we choose the ones with the largest number of visitors. As a general rule, we use a core set containing the 15 largest international engines which, according to market surveys, account for 80% of all searches on the Internet. The top 15 are as follows:

• AltaVista
• HotBot
• Yahoo!
• About.com
• Lycos
• Fast/AllTheWeb
• Direct Hit
• LookSmart
• MSN
• AOL
• Google
• Overture
• Netscape
• Open Directory

In some cases, it may be useful to be present in as many search engines as possible, especially if you need to build worldwide exposure.

Getting to the Top

The reason for marketing your site to search engines is obviously to increase visits to your page. The latest statistics indicate that users rarely refer to sites after the first 20 or 30 returned by search engines. There is also the psychological aspect that a site at the top of the list has greater appeal for the user. This assures that your page will be clicked.

Every Search Engine in the world has its own methods and criteria for registering sites and classifying pages. It takes in depth research and specialized techniques to achieve a good position in their lists. Proper keyword selection and WEB page design are critical to gaining top billing. Registration with the search engine is one way to improve your exposure and this can be accomplished by paying a fee to get included in their directory. The costs vary from one directory to the next. For example, Yahoo commands a premium for their services at $299 per year for directory inclusion. 

Another increasingly more popular method is "pay-per-click" advertising. In this method, the site is marketed by keywords. We purchase certain keywords that cause your site to show up as a sponsored site in the search engine results. This is a very effective method for reaching potential customers who are looking for your products or services. The costs associated with this method vary depending on the keywords or phrases selected, the search engine and the placement desired. We can provide cost estimates for any WEB site.

Know your customers and keep them coming back

Web sites let you interact with your customers, but you have to find out who they are. Use contests, and special offers to build customer loyalty. From a marketing point of view, the goal is to make your site a must-visit destination. Dell Computer Corporation frequently offers its customers a discount of $100 or free hardware options to order through its WEB site.

And This is Just the Beginning

Don't think the work is over once your site has been registered with the search engines! The work has just begun. One of the activities that we perform is a periodic analysis of how your site is placing on the search lists. If you've been overtaken, and this happens over time, we analyze the competition to see whether or not we can overtake the competition. This price of this service is variable according to the time required to perform the analysis.