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to sum up what everyone should know about search engine positioning.
First, two caveats:
1) Search Engine Positioning is only a tiny part of the big Internet Marketing picture. It takes time and there are other things that will pay off far more in the long run.
2) This is a gross simplification of the whole process.

1. This discussion will focus on spider engines. A spider engine is an engine that goes to your site and indexes you based on what it finds. Directories are a whole 'nother ball game (which we will address in another article). Good examples of spiders are: Infoseek, Excite, and AltaVista.

2. Every search engine is different. You need to learn the "algorithm" (set of rules) used by each engine to rank pages.

3. These algorithms change constantly. This is why tips like "put 3 % of your target keyword in your title tag" are probably worthless by the time you hear them.

4. The only reliable way to learn a site's algorithm is to analyze actual results of a search on that engine. This must be done using a reliable keyword density analyzer.
This tool will show you the weight of particular keywords in high ranking documents. You then simply reproduce this weight in your document to attempt to reproduce the results. Any advice you find that did not come from an actual analysis is probably smoke and mirrors. This method is very reliable. There are a few other factors that will affect rank that can not be measured this way (link popularity, spam filtering etc.), but keyword density is the easiest to measure and most reliable factor.

5. You should not only be concerned with the rank of your listing, but with the way it appears in the engine as well. If your listing is #1, but looks like a bunch of junk (try a search right now and you'll see what I mean), it will be a waste of your time. The appearance of your listing depends on two of three things:

a) your title tag e.g. "[title]title here\[/title]

b) your description tag [meta name=description value="description here like this"] (applies to some engines - all others use the following)

c) the first 250 words (or so) of visible text on your site on your site.

"A" above is what the engine links to your page. B or C are used as descriptive text for your link. You must balance your work on these tags. That is, sometimes what gets you a high rank will not make for an enticing listing. Remember that your title is most important. Think of it as a headline for an ad.

6. No software in itself is going to get you a high position on a search engine. Period. There are many software products claiming to get you a higher position on the web. For the most part, save your money. There are really only two programs you need (and you may not even need them):

a) A keyword density analyzer. You don't really need this if you have some other tool that will allow you to analyze the relative mathematical composition of any text. If what I just said flew over your head, a keyword density analyzer is for you.

b) A site submitter. You don't really need one of these, either, if you are strictly focusing on a high position in the spider engines. You can probably submit these pages one by one just as easily since the process of gaining a high rank is a surgical one. However, if you need to submit many pages at once (if you do it will save time), or you want to submit to other types of sites (most submitters submit to over 900 sites and spider engines account for about 12 of those), then it is a good idea to get some software that will automate this task for you. We've developed a powerful multi-use tool that will spider all of your pages and submit each of them to all known spider engines (it has about 20 other functions as well - all of them key).

There is, of course, much more to it than I have listed here, but this information will get you started on the right track.

Article by Mark Joyner, CEO of Aesop Marketing Corporation.
Mark is also the author of 1001 Killer Internet Marketing Tactics. an absolute *must have* for anyone serious about Internet marketing. It will dramatically boost the results of any campaign in a very real and measurable way.

Search Engine Positioning Going Mainstream August 23 1999

Lately, using doorway pages to gain top search engine positioning has become a major topic in Web circles. Doorway pages, also known as entry or bridge pages, are Web pages designed specifically to rank highly on the unique ranking algorithms of each search engine. They are often associated with spammers--at least until now.

Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch recently featured the use of doorways by State Farm Insurance, the leading US auto insurance firm, to get to the top of search results for insurance related searches. State Farm did get the top positions, securing the first and second positions for "auto insurance" on Excite, Infoseek, HotBot, and Lycos, plus the first and second positions for a number of other phrases like "life insurance,' "boat insurance," "home insurance," and "car insurance." Everything was going great for State Farm, its doorway pages generating an extra 100,000 unique new users in 11 months. This being the first time that a major corporation had been publicly exposed for using techniques associated with spamming, many Web promoters were curious to know what the search engine companies would say about it. What they heard was the best piece of good news they have had in a long time.

According to interviews with search engine executives in the Search Engine Watch, the search engines seem to have adopted a whole new healthy attitude toward doorway pages! As long as your doorway pages do not promote keywords or phrases that have nothing to do with your Web site's content, and as long as you do not submit too many doorways with the same keyword and clog up the search results, you are free to go for it! In other words, if your doorways help search engine users to find what they are looking for without being deceived, no one will penalize you. (Watch out for Infoseek, though. It doesn't like it when your doorways redirect users to a new location without their intervention, e.g. using the META refresh tag or a CGI).

Why are doorway pages are such a hot issue?
Over 95% of web users find what they are looking for by visiting the top 6 search engines. Yahoo alone handled over 55 million searches and page views in December 1997. Everybody knows that even a few good positions on even one or two important keywords or phrases can drive thousands or hundreds of thousands of quality visitors to a web site per day.

The search engines are over-flowing. They have too many pages in their indices and they don't do a very good job of giving users what they are looking for. Often, a good web site may be ranked low by a search engine, and a very bad web site in the same subject area ranked high! Sometimes the only way the good site can rank higher is by using doorways. Research has shown that people hardly ever go past the top 30 search results for any one search. The top 10 results receive 78% more traffic than those in position 11 to 30 do. The top 30 results get over 90% of the search traffic. This alone explains why some sites do so well and others so disappointingly, and why it is so critical to be ranked highly.

Creating doorway pages is one of those elusive things in life. It can be done, but it's no longer as easy to cheat the search engines as was back in 1995! It now takes some considerable time to study, track, test and reverse-engineer search results.
Those that get it right are handsomely rewarded! Coincidentally, this interest in doorway pages heightened just as we were launching the SearchPositioning.comWeb site, which features an online Automatic Doorways Generator, plus other tools, software, information, and resources useful in search engine positioning. We developed, through reverse-engineering many search results, a system that creates optimized, professional doorways for web site promoters. By developing a system that easily allows webmasters to serve themselves online, we were able to drive costs down and provide the automatic doorways generation service at an affordable $34.95 per year for unlimited doorways and keywords. Our goal is to enable any webmaster to responsibly position his site highly on search engines. The few services that did this before we stepped in were offering customized services that are beyond the financial reach of most webmasters, well in the thousands of dollars.

Doorway pages are definitely very effective Web promotion tools. But they are also controversial, misunderstood technically and ethically, and can sometimes do more harm than good when abused.
None of us really knows 100% what the best approach to all this is. I believe that sharing, discussion, and putting issues out in the open are what promotes awareness, better decision-making, and progress.
I am therefore inviting all readers to contribute their experiences, thoughts, fears, ethical concerns, successes, tips, and problems with doorways. We can all learn from each other about this most important and effective aspect of Web promotion. I also wish to invite you to our Web promotion discussion forum at www.searchpositioning.com.

To get the discussion going, let me say something about one thing that everybody asks about doorways: is it fair and ethical to use them? I'd say yes. Doorways are not inherently good or bad, it is how they are used that is. Used properly, they help people find what they are looking for. They also solve some serious weaknesses in search engines. You could, for example, have a site on parenting.
But because your site may be made almost entirely of dynamically generated pages (database or CGI driven), behind a membership system, be highly graphical, or have long editorial text that scores poorly with search engines, your site will go unnoticed by search engines. It may be the best site on parenting, but the engines will rank it very poorly.
Doorways here can give you the justice you deserve. And until search engines learn to properly index dynamic content, images, pages with long text, password protected pages, and, best of all, learn to rate and weight in the entire site's content and factor it into the search results, doorways are the best solution for many webmasters.

Article by David Gikandi, programmer at SearchPositioning.com, which features tools and resources that get you top positions for your web site on AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, and Lycos.

� 1997 [email protected]

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