In order to take full advantage of the power of the internet, you need to ensure your web site is optimized to allow these search engines to find you. Additionally, active registration with some search engines is the only way to increase the position of your web site within these search engines.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming much more difficult. And it will get much, much worse.
Six years ago you could easily count the firms doing SEO work. The number of sites competing for each search term were fewer, and the state of the art spamming tricks centered on white-on-white text and multiple title tags. Getting a top ranking out of the 50,000 results returned was relatively easy to accomplish because those 50k results were most often poorly optimized. Getting into the top 10 meant being in the top 0.02% of the 50k results, which is certainly not trivial, but easily accomplished when facing naïve competition. A little effort went a long way, and site owners could even do it themselves.
Now the tip of the iceberg is larger. Time has caused two things to happen: the SEO competition is trickier than 6 years ago, and the population of web sites is larger. There are now around 250,000 results for most 2-word searches, and the new sites are often tuned by SEO practitioners. Instead of needing to be in the top 0.02%, you now need to be in the top 0.005% of a more competitive group of pages. Such rankings are still possible, but beyond the ability of most site owners.
For the search engines the good news is that the 90:10 rule applies, and that by adding only 50 times more pages, instead of the 500 times predicted to exist as hidden pages, they will account for 90% of the frequently used content on the web. The remaining content is seldom used. The consequence is that the iceberg is no longer hidden. The search engines will need to adjust their algorithms a few times to compensate for the increase in indexed content, but they will love the fresh topic-specific and relevant pages.
Aside from the additional number of tweaks, each with a submission and spidering cycle of over three weeks (making this a much longer process than today, probably doubling the project schedule a year from now), the precision needed to rank a page well in one search engine will certainly disqualify that same page from a simultaneous top ranking in many search engines. Pages that rank well today in many engines will find that their aggregated ranking will erode and sites will have to settle for ranking in only the three or four engines at a time. If a client wants other engines to rank their site, then they must tune additional pages, thus they will have to expand their content and Search Engine Optimization base to include many more pages within their site. (Remember - doorways and cloaking are considered spam, so editing honest pages will be necessary). Optimizing more pages is certainly the way to go, but it doubles or triples the work involved by the SEO practitioner.
As a result, SEO practitioners have a much more difficult battle, they require much more sophisticated and integrated tools, projects require more time, they must optimize more pages, and thus they must inherently charge much more than today. If this is done top rankings are still very possible, but this becomes the realm of only the exceptionally competent (or very lucky) SEO practitioner.
Some area we cover with search engine optimization:
Basics
Indexing
Keywords I
Meta tags
Text, graphics and multimedia
Advanced
Keywords II
CSS and H tags
Searchbots
Frames
Content
Things NOT to do
Poison
Mirror sites
Redirects
Other tricks
Directory submission
Links
Link Popularity
Inbound vs. Outbound links
Pay per Click (PPC)
Maintenance
Please contact us to discuss your SEO needs in more detail.
