Do a simple query on a search engine--and what you usually get
are hundreds of documents--many of which are unusable and irrelevant.
For example, a Web user looking for Time Warner Inc.'s home page
by entering the query term "Time Warner" in a search engine may find
the right site buried beneath many other sites.
If your Web site comes up number 100 in a search, it is unlikely
that people will see it, said Brad Aronson, president of Digital
Frontiers , an Internet marketing and Web site design company in Bryn
Mawr, Pa.
One Answer: Buy Words
The general solution to avoid getting buried by others' words is
to buy a "search word," an option introduced last year by several
search engines.
For example, it is possible for a company to buy its own name or
an ad to ensure it is listed at the top of a search results page.
Time Warner could thus ensure that anyone who enters the term
"Time Warner" will see its home page or ad at the top of the search
results.
Charges for a banner ads in search engines vary, but tend to be
expensive, according to Beth Lanahan, spokesperson for one of the
Web's more popular search engines, InfoSeek. Depending on impression
and specific topic, advertisements that rotate through directories
range from $7,500 to $73,000 for a four-week period. Advertisements
that appear only with the results of a specific key word search are a
minimum of $1,000 for a four-week period.
WebCrawler, Lycos, and Infoseek offer advertisement banner links,
however Alta Vista's product is still in beta-test.
Don Bradley, spokesperson for Digital Equipment Corp.'s Alta
Vista engine, however, said that users must learn more about query
techniques to define a search. Alta Vista and WebCrawler offer their
users tips on searching.
Proper Page Design: Less Costly
A more cost-efficient way to make it easy to find your Web page
is to design your page in a manner that provides the highest possible
relevance to keywords--pages then will come up in most search engines.
(Digital Frontiers, 610/527-1517, InfoSeek, 408/567-2768, WebCrawler,
510/883-7152; DEC, 508/493-5111)
Two Ways Engines List Sites
Search mechanisms fall into two categories. The first are sites
like Yahoo! which function like telephone books, usually listing sites
one or two times under specific subjects. Web masters should submit
their URL in order to be listed.
By contrast, search engines like WebCrawler and InfoSeek use
"spiders" or "robots" to index the Web. These programs automatically
search the Web by indexing one page and then indexing all documents
that are hyperlinked to it. If your Web site has 50 pages, a spider
web may index every page.
Major engines--including Alta Vista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos,
Yahoo! and WebCrawler--use a dataset indexed by the spider to provide
a set of related sites.
These sites are presented to the user in order of their
relevance, which is determined by set criteria used by the engine.