By PHILIP ZOHRAB*
Misinformation, scepticism and outright scamming abound when it comes to search engines and what they can do for your business.
If you have a website, you have probably received an email from Sarah Williams or Christine Hall saying: "Hi. I visited [website address], and noticed you're not listed
on some search engines!"
They offer to submit your site to more than 300,000 search engines and directories, signing off: "I would love to hear from you."
This is really the work of a piece of software called a spambot, which crawls the net looking for email addresses for spamming purposes. Sarah Williams has not visited your site and done a test to see how many search engines you are listed on.
The same email is sent out to everyone the spambot comes across. Ironically, if your site truly was lost in cyberspace, you probably would not get these emails.
They are a waste of time and money. A handful of search engines represent the vast majority of all search engine traffic.
Submitting your website to 300,000 search engines can be counter-productive and hurt your search engine ranking.
Some of the major search engines penalise regular, automated submissions, preferring instead to find your site by following the links that make up the World Wide Web.
So how do you find out if search engine optimisation will make your site more effective? There is a free search engine ranking report tool at http://www.searchenginestrategies.co.nz/search-engine-rankings.html where you can enter your site address and search terms used to find your site. The system will check the ranking on the major search engines and email you a report.
If your site performs poorly on search engines, usually no amount of submitting will help turn it around. There is no magical cure involving the insertion of a few keywords in the meta tags. You need to understand your target audience, how they look for what you are offering, and manipulate the structure and content of the site accordingly.
Only then is it worthwhile submitting to the search engines.
* Philip Zohrab works for Web Medic, a website redesign and marketing agency.
phil@webmedic.co.nz
