VOLUME 3a. May 2nd, 1999 - Advertising on the Internet:

Search Engines: Rating - Content and Keywords.

By: Ian Clayton, AXSES SCL

Back in the early days when we first launched http://barbados.org, we were
very successful in getting many pages of the site listed on top of nearly all SE's.

There were a few exceptions, and try as we may we could not get Excite to pick up our
pages. Finding what was wrong was almost impossible. I talked to managers
and salespeople who said, "A robot takes care of that, we don’t know exactly what
it does". No one, it seemed, was in charge of the robot.. It was a
frightening thought. " robots are in charge here, the world is going to be driven by
robots and no one can stop them". I wanted to speak to the programmer and was told
programmers do not talk to clients. Programmers, like the robots, I thought,
do not talk. We finally did talk; it seemed that our pages had too much information for
the Excite robot to decipher. It could not determine a definitive set of keywords.

We fixed the problem quickly by creating a special page just for the Excite
SE. Later Excite also changed the systems for evaluating keywords and suddenly
http://barbados.org pages dominated their Barbados searches. This was another
problem for Excite to fix.

Rules, size and content:

The story of Excite was not unusual. The point is that SEs have rules and if
you don’t understand this you are sunk. There are rules about content, page
size and keywords that you have to know. Some engines still like shorter pages
but many like AltaVista now favour pages with significant content. (We
generally have best results on AltaVista, for example, if the page is 800
words or more).

Some SEs don’t care just what size a page is they will look at the size of the
site, what it links to and how popular it is. The aim is to establish what the
site is about, assess its relevance and eliminate fraudulent pages and sites
(spamming).

Keywords.

A tempting way to improve ranking for a particular search word (keyword), is
to repeat the word often in the page. It may not be good writing style, but with
careful planning it can be done. In fact it must be done, but it must not be
overdone. SEs have very strict rules about how often a word can be
repeated. If the repeated word appears to be redundant, the page will not be indexed.
In some cases the entire site may be dropped. There are no standard rules for how
many times a word can be repeated relative to other content, but it seems to
vary from 2-8% on most SE's. Excite still likes to see those words repeated
more than others, but Infoseek will drop the rating, and sometimes the site,
if any word is repeated more than 5% relative to all other words in the page.

The position of the keyword on the page is also important. Words on the top,
in titles and headings carry more weight. This often presents a design conflict,
the top section for example, is usually the best place to put a logo, an image
or a set of menu options.

Keywords are search words.

It a common mistake to style a web page after a successful advertising slogan
and expect that the same words will work on the net. The words you choose to
put in your Webpage (particularly in the title and headings) are words the
robot may evaluate and index (we will talk about special SE tags later).

"Barbados Super Saver" is a good catch phrase for a magazine ad, but the
average traveller is not going to look on the Internet for "Barbados Super
Saver"; save, savings maybe but "Super Saver" or even "Saver" is unlikely.
They might look for "budget holidays", travel savings, Caribbean sales,
discounts and cheap trips etc., if they are looking for deals. Hot, free,
web, Internet, sale and travel are amongst the most relevant searched words
on the Internet and these are good words to use, if they fit.
(see: http://www.adz.net/top200/dogpiletop200.html.).

A traditional ad is designed to create Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action
(AIDA). Designing a SE savvy webpage, in contrast, requires knowing your prospects'
search behavior and integrating their keywords into the page design. The final
product has to create Desire and Action, but perhaps more importantly it must also
appeal to the robots and get good SE rating, or it may never be found. Of course
if the page is simply a call to action for the ad, then forget the SE rules and make
the page work as part of the advertising call.

More than keywords make a site

Keywords, by themselves, are not going to make a site get on the top of the
list. You can stack a page with keywords and still not have relevant content.
SE have developed many ways of assessing the real merit of a page and site.
They include rating for popularity (how many other sites link to it), timeliness
(some SE give a more recent page the edge), frequency of change and its
relevance when ranked with all other sites on the Internet.

It is a tall order for a robot and they do not do it well. But try it sometime;
take any keyword, find all the sites in the world with that keyword
(a few hundred thousand), then rank them. It can't be done unless you write
a program to do it, try that sometime. Just when you get it right some
smart Alec will find away to outsmart it.

Spammers and smart Alecs make the rules

There are a lot of smart Alecs trying to get to the top of a SE listing by
using clever tricks. Robots do not like them and are making it hard to be a
successful smart Alecs. This is good, but it also makes it harder to do an
honest job. If you are not well informed and are not very careful you could
be mistaken for a smart Alecs, which will be very bad for business.

TO BE CONTINUED- Next week we look at how to improve ratings.and popularity,

and some smart Alecs tricks to avoid.

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INTERNET MARKETING NEWSLETTER AND TUTORIAL

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Internet Marketing -Intro mch 8
vol 1. Travel on net mch 12
vol 2a. Promo on the net mch 21
vol 2b. Features of the net mch 29
vol 2c. The new marketing mix Apr 8
vol 3. iNet Advertsing-SE Apr 20