Strategic Internet Marketing & Management, LLC.

  
Search Engine Optimization
Your efforts to create an attractive site are of little value if your target market can’t find your site. Since search engines produce over 90% of all Web traffic, increasing your visibility on search engines is an essential part of any marketing program. Search Engine Optimization involves a combination of elements including keywords, descriptions, page titles, text, and links among other techniques to increase your site’s ranking on major search engines for selected search terms.

Following implementation of these changes your site can be re-submitted to the major search engines for review on an individual basis.

Please be aware that there are many companies offering to improve your ranking with tricks and gimmicks. These may work for in the short run, but can result in downgrading or deletion of your site from a search engine's listings. SIMM, LLC. helps assure good content on your site and good visibility on search engines.

Types of Search Eninge Submissions

Search engines vs. directories
Although optimizing your site for search engines is complicated, the submission process is relatively straightforward. Usually you only need to provide a URL and an e-mail address. Directories, on the other hand, expect you to:

• Find the appropriate category for your site
• Write a site description
• Provide a URL and an e-mail address

Paying search engines for rankings
"Pay-Per-Click" search engines allow participating sites to pay for high rankings in their results. Overture.com, one of the Web's top 10 search engines, is a noted pay-per-click site.

To be listed by a pay-per-click search engine, you choose a few relevant keywords and the amount you're willing to pay for each click-through from that engine. When a user enters a keyword, the search engine lists sites in order of how much they agreed to pay for that keyword.

The term "search engine" is often used generically to describe both crawler-based search engines and human-powered directories. These two types of search engines gather their listings in radically different ways.

Crawler-Based Search Engines

Crawler-based search engines, such as Google, create their listings automatically. They "crawl" or "spider" the web, then people search through what they have found.

If you change your web pages, crawler-based search engines eventually find these changes, and that can affect how you are listed. Page titles, body copy and other elements all play a role.

Human-Powered Directories

A human-powered directory, such as the Open Directory, depends on humans for its listings. You submit a short description to the directory for your entire site, or editors write one for sites they review. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted.

Changing your web pages has no effect on your listing. Things that are useful for improving a listing with a search engine have nothing to do with improving a listing in a directory. The only exception is that a good site, with good content, might be more likely to get reviewed for free than a poor site.

"Hybrid Search Engines" Or Mixed Results

In the web's early days, it used to be that a search engine either presented crawler-based results or human-powered listings. Today, it is extremely common for both types of results to be presented. Usually, a hybrid search engine will favor one type of listings over another. For example, MSN Search is more likely to present human-powered listings from LookSmart. However, it does also present crawler-based results (as provided by Inktomi), especially for more obscure queries.