Having a compelling, information-rich Web site is only half the battle when you consider that your site will be among thousands of others in a given category. So how can surfers find you among the multitude of online entries?
This conundrum led Harry White, who heads up the Houston-based design firm Houston InterWeb (http://www.houston-interweb.com) to research what criteria the top eight search engines use when ranking Web sites.
For instance, doing an online "healthcare" search generates 1,618 pages on Yahoo!, 106,015 pages on Excite, 350,811 on Infoseek and 26,909 on Lycos. Depending on where your company falls in a search engine's ranking, your potential customers may not ever find you. Although more than 90 percent of Internet surfers use one of the major eight search engines - Excite, HotBot, Alivista, Magellan, Yahoo!, Lycos, Infoseek, and Web Crawler - these surfers are not navigating through thousands of pages; more than likely they're stopping at the top 10, according to White.
In fact, before researching these search engines, White couldn't find his own company when he surfed using likely descriptors like "Web page design firms" and "Web page developers."
Search Engine Pointers
Although submitting effective company descriptions to search engines is not rocket science, it does require a working knowledge of what criteria each search engine is looking for when they rank companies. For instance, most search engines work by sending a program called a "crawler" or "spider" to your site. But Yahoo - not really considered a search engine by Web programming experts - does things a little differently.
When you submit your site to Yahoo, it does not use a crawler to locate your company; it relies on a company's 200 word description, according to Paul Graham, president of Viaweb, a hosting site for commercial Web vendors. Another Yahoo peculiarity is that it catalogs companies alphabetically by name, notes Jennifer Hwang, PR manager at Yahoo.
As one of the few companies that specializes in understanding the complexities of search engines, Houston InterWeb helps companies rise to the top 20 of a search engine's list by staying on top of what the ranking criteria are. (The criteria changes weekly, according to White.)
White offers three pointers that can catapult a company up a few hundred notches just by re-working the company descriptions that are given to search engines.
- Use Relevant Titles. First ask the pivotal question "How do you want people to find you?" And, from there choosing at least three queries to base your company's description on. For example, a hospital that specializes in pediatrics, cardiology and emergency medicine should include each of those specialties in the document source of its Web site description so that a consumer doing a search under any of those categories might likely find that particular hospital.
"The most common mistake people make is using their company name [like Presbyterian Hospital] in the document source," says White.
- Be Mindful of Key Words. Using metatags, or hidden key words that cannot be seen by the surfer but are used for coding purposes by the programmer, in the document source will not be recognized by all search engines. In fact, Excite rejects sites that use metatags.
- Pay Attention to Company Overviews. More and more search engines are looking at what companies are saying about themselves in the brief overview statements on their home pages and comparing them to the document source descriptions provided.
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Infoseek Penalizes For Repeat Key Words Indicative of the ever-changing search engine criteria, Infoseek is now penalizing Web pages that contain more than one occurrence of the same keyword within metatag descriptions, according to search engine watchers at Houston InterWeb, Inc. a Web page design firm in Houston. This latest stipulation (which could change next week) seems to affect only newly submitted pages. In addition, it is the visible or semi-visible body text and hyperlinks contained in company document source descriptions that will now determine a company's Infoseek ranking. |
If there are significant discrepancies, companies can be deleted from a search engine's category. For instance if a company claimed it specialized in medical software in its document source description and there was no mention of medical software in its overview statement, the company could be dropped from that search engine's category.
In addition to developing Web sites, Houston InterWeb provides monthly ranking analyses (starting at $150/month) for its clients that include positioning reports and Web logs. The positioning reports track where a company is ranked on each of the top eight search engines on a monthly basis.
If the company is not within the top 20, Houston InterWeb gives it a "0" ranking. The Web log is a software tracking program that allows clients to access when and how surfers are finding the site, including the search engine(s) they used and the descriptions they typed in.
(Houston InterWeb, Inc., 713/627-9494, Viaweb, 617/876-2692; Yahoo!, 408/731-3362)