You’ve given thought to your idea for some time. In the end, you’ve chosen to act upon your dreams, and began the planning process for development of your own online business presence. You have researched potential products, established your domain name, and arranged for, or completed construction of your virtual property. The site includes every feature your potential customers are looking for, is laid out in an efficient and focused manner, and is sure to convert lookers into the all-important buyer. Every conceivable aspect of design, construction, and consumer research is complete, and you are finally ready to launch your creation. Or are you?
With the hard work, and financial investment relative to the building, and establishment of a quality internet property, ensuring its overall popularity on the search engines is key. Without proper planning relative to achieving quality search listings, the launch of any new enterprise can turn into an anticlimactic affair.
Search engines continue to provide a potential wealth of traffic to the online entrepreneur of today – traffic that can make or break the newly launched e-commerce site. Preparing your site to deliver a top ranking search result for specific, targeted keyword(s) is imperative to a lower cost of operation, and a stronger business model.
There are a number of varieties of search engines out there today, each requiring a different approach in achieving a meaningful ranking. The three most common today are:
True Search Engines
These database sites scour the internet based upon both submitted recommendations, and links to new sites found through existing ones, adding properties that meet preset requirements, and categorizing them for future use. The largest example of this type of search engine is Google, the largest internet database anywhere.
Directory Based Search Engines
These portals attempt to provide greater usability and site quality to their visitors by manually reviewing every site submission before including the property in the search results seen by their users. Yahoo is the largest current example of a directory based search engine, with thousands of manually reviewed sites. Many directory operators now charge a fee for submission, to cover the expense associated with the manual review process.
Pay Per Placement Search Engines
These providers have taken a previously frustrating site owner experience, and turned it into a hugely successful enterprise. With the growth of the internet market, submission turnaround time was becoming increasingly slow, a strong negative to the site owner requiring traffic today, not six months from today. The pay per clicks delivered the ability for the newcomer to the market to immediately achieve top ranking on some of the internet’s most traveled sites, through successful keyword bidding. The most popular of these services is GoTo.com, whose top bidded listings are given priority placement on many of the large scale portals, including AOL, MSN, and AltaVista.
Achieving a popular, traffic generating listing within both the true and directory based engines is no simple task. The rules applied either mathematically, or manually in the case of the directories, are complex, and consistently changing. The constant shifts in requirements are applied regularly in an attempt to better filter out abusers of the system, whose sites offer little in the way of true content or quality. This reality has made the required effort on the part of the honest operator far greater than ever before.
Utilizing tools to measure your site’s potential for success within these different environments is an imperative to assuring that you are both successfully listed, and achieving strong search result based traffic numbers as quickly as possible.
With the increased demand for this type of specific and carefully measured targeting within one’s site design, there has been a significant increase in the number of service offerings in this area. The nature of these offerings vary from operations that charge a monthly fee to manage your site’s search engine preparation, and monthly submission, with guaranteed results for specific keywords, to softwares that analyze your site construction based upon the same algorhythyms utilized by the engines themselves to assess overall potential.
In the end, the product you select will depend largely upon the ability of your target market’s search potential to deliver large volumes of traffic if proper placement is achieved. If, however, your market is so niche that you feel the number of searches relative to be too low to justify the expense associated, you may choose to prepare your site on your own, utilizing some of the tools offered by Online for Success. This approach can be far more efficient, and effective, for the internet business owner who wishes to establish their listings within a non-competitive market, or one who simply cannot afford the costs associated with pay for service offerings.