Web Analytics Tutorial

Lesson 3 – Search Engines

Conclusions

Pay-for-Placement

Many search engines are now offering priority placement for people who want to pay a fee. Other engines offer special fee-based listings. When evaluating the available options, be sure to read the terms carefully. For example, while Overture will get your listing into most of the top search engines, Yahoo! will not guarantee a listing, even if you pay for it. Yahoo!’s service is for priority handling of your listing request and does not guarantee a placement.

As with any marketing campaign, you will need to experiment to decide whether these are worth it. Some sites have great success with pay-for-placement, others see no change in results. You should start by submitting a few URLs, bidding a reasonable price and then carefully monitoring the results. These services will give you reports on clickthroughs, but you can also use your own web analytics reports to monitor it. The easiest way is to set up specific URLs that you submit to each site for each keyword. You can then track these in the All Requests Report or configure them in Summary as an ‘Advertisement’ and use the Advertising Report. The entire next lesson is devoted to Advertising and will cover this in more detail.

Further Study

This entire process we have been discussing is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and we have only touched the tip of the iceberg. There are numerous ‘tricks’ to get search engines to find you, but it all boils down to the fact that if your site is the most relevant for a given topic then it is in the search engine’s best interest to rank you highest.

For more information on this, a search on any search engine for “Search Engine Optimization” or “Search Engine Ranking” will bring up lost of relevant (and some non-relevant) pages. You will notice that there are many services available for a range of prices to help you with this process, from simple services that will discover your ranking and submit your site, to custom reports and assistance in improving the design of your web pages. Most of these will charge a fee, so you will need to decide whether the cost is worth it or if you can handle submissions on your own.

There are several good tutorials on SEO on the Web. A couple of them are listed here:

WebMonkey SEO Article

WebMonkey has an excellent article on search engine optimization written by a former employee of HotBot, one of the top search engines on the Web.

Search Engine Watch

Search Engine Watch provide a plethora of free information on improving your ranking including submission tips, META tag tips and more.