Not withstanding all the effort in producing your great pages, an important aspect to many Clients is Search Engine Optimization optimisation prominence and Submission, and having prominence with the Search Engines and Directories. Or in layman's terms gaining Prominence so that visitors have more chance of finding your web site. In our humble opinion optimisation is a lot to do with how your site is perceived by other sites, and only a little to do with your site itself. Sadly there are lots of examples with no prominence. So much for 'the potential to reach millions'.
"Submitting your site to hundreds of search engines does not in itself guarantee you lots of traffic"
UK Web site promotion strategy Rather than rely on the Search Engines and Directories, if you wanted to use a web-site to distribute information, or promote your service locally you would be wise to mention your Web-site on your advertising in newspapers and on local radio, on your letterheads, business cards, and your company vehicles etc. Your web site should complement any existing advertising your business has. On no account should you rely solely on 'free' traffic from so called natural search results.
The Search Engines work in different ways. Some are just databases; others a cross between a true Search Engine and a Directory. Your pages will be tuned to maximize the chances of your site becoming prominent with them. Thanks to a good listing in Yahoo our Pictures from Great Britain pages hosted on Lineone are getting thousands of hits a week, that is hundreds of people a week looking at it in less misleading terms. The following applies equally to web site optimisation and prominence as it does to buying or selling shares "Past performance does not indicate future performance".
"Forget the hype about submission to 1400 Search Engines, 95% of all traffic comes from just 6"
Taking a long-term view is this a good thing?Some Web Sites are unlikely to ever achieve Search Engine prominence. No prominence means few if any visitors. What a waste of someone's money hopefully not yours! These are often produced by individuals with little idea of how to make a page search engine friendly i.e. search engine optimization. "It is not just to do with the meta tags either, a common misconception". Nearly a half of all the visitors to Cornishlight come via a Search Engine. Many of Cornwall by Cornishlight's pages are highly ranked with the Search Engines and Directories for relevant keywords. So are our Other Sites and some of those we have designed for Clients.
"If a website has no prominence the chances of anyone finding it via a search engine are greatly reduced. In fact there may be little chance. (Unless of course they have paid for a featured listing)"
Consider the following words. For Cornwall by Cornishlight Cornwall and Cornwall Tourist Information'. For Beautiful Devon in Altavista ' Devon ' and in Yahoo ' Devon' Yes as of Jan 2002 we were on the first page? For our Beautiful England .' London Tourist Information' London Pictures Map of England, puffins. For DIY Paving in yahoo How to build a patio and in Google Build a patio and Altavista How to build a patio Sadly however you should be aware we are unable to guarantee you any position whatsoever when a site submit. Pages that were friendly when this was written may not be at the time you are reading this. You should also be aware many Search Engines and Directories now charge for review, with no guarantee of placement onto their index.
The Directories Three of our own sites Cornwall by Cornishlight, as are Beautiful England and Beautiful Devon, are listed in many of the Search Engine's Travel Directories. Cornishlight had a 3 star rating from Infoseek. This brought yet more visitors to the site. Though we are happy to submit web site to them we again will not guarantee you entry into any of the Directories such as Yahoo nor will our quotation include for paid submissions submit url.
Free Advice Again sadly we say please do not contact us expecting us to tell you where all our visitors come from or how to go about getting search engine Optimization prominence or traffic to your site for free. Even if we know, we will not. General advice and polite comment yes.
N.B. The Search Engines and Directories are taking longer
and longer to look at new sites. Some have not indexed any new sites for over six months. Conversely the fastest (in Nov 2003) we had two brand new domains indexed and generating referrals was 2 weeks from uploading. If only that happened all the time. When your url submit there is no guarantee that they will even look at yours, let alone that it have any popularity when they do, or that it will remain over time. Popularity can (and does) go up as well as down, sometimes over night.
Sometimes it has very little do to with the site itself but upon external factors which that site itself is hardly likely to be able to control or influence.
For example an inbound link to your site from elsewhere
that you considered trivial, but which no longer exists could have been important.
(The same remark applies to outbound links.)
Search engine algorithms are constantly changing and
kept a closely guarded secret,
one has to constantly maintain a site in the hope of achieving
and maintaining prominence.
Sometimes they delete sites; other time’s pages or indeed sites
that have been popular with the engines for months
or years can loose favour, and traffic plummet or indeed disappear totally,
sometimes overnight. Indeed popularity can yo yo from week to
week or month to month seemingly for no good reason.
All we can say is if that happens to you do not panic
into major site rewrites until taking stock.
There are also many other factors that help determine whether or
not a website will get anyone looking at it and ultimately
whether or not it will be successful, and remain successful over time.
These include market forces; for example a recession;
changing preferences of holiday destination or type;
and market saturation or indeed a particular bubble bursting.
All good reasons not to find yourself reliant on search
engine traffic regardless whether you have the budget
to fund paid listings results or not.
In summary a site owner is either arrogant or naive
to expect prominence and indeed traffic levels to remain
unchanged over time, particularly if they choose not to
constantly monitor and maintain their site for constantly
changing algorithms, or take into account
and try and counter, if necessary, external factors affecting their market.
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