Everyone wants to rank on Google but one of the less well-known secrets of search engine optimization is that Google underperforms in a number of commercial (and non-commercial) sectors. When you set out to optimize a new site for search, one of the questions you need to answer is: which search engine shows the most promise?
You have to take several factors into consideration when launching a new site’s SEO campaign:
- Which search engines serve the best traffic for that sector
- Which search engines are most responsive to new sites
- Which search engines are least responsive to new sites
- Which search engines assist with branding
That a search engine may not drive qualified traffic is important, but if it is a brand-friendly search engine you may still want to utilize its resources. However, let’s take a look at each factor in detail:
Best traffic – Every search engine has an audience. Forget all the nonsense you read about “reach”. Reach is a meaningless metric because it only shows how many faces are forced to click past a search box. When you evaluate a search engine’s potential to help you, you should only be looking at who actually uses the search engine. Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have resident audiences that utilize their services extensively. It follows that a large portion of their search traffic comes from those audiences. So who uses Yahoo! and Microsoft’s networks?
Google has name visibility and most people probably use Google on occasion, but who uses Google regularly? Would you be surprised to learn there are significant differences between the core audiences for Google, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo!, and Ask? Learn who uses which search engines and why. There is very little data about search market demographics but most high traffic, multi-topic Web sites actually have a fair amount of data. Anyone who has access to multiple Web sites’ statistics also has a fair amount of data. Raw Web server log data can tell you volumes about who is using which search engines to find what types of content.
Target the right search audience.
Responsive to new sites – Where can you rank first, right? Wrong. A search engine is responsive to a new site if it crawls most of that site quickly and indexes most of that content quickly. You’re not being exclusive when you favor a particular search engine. They’ll all crawl your root URL very soon after the site goes live. But who goes deeper? Who actually shows your content? I can tell you that Ask is usually the last search engine to feature a site in its index. Ask is not very responsive to new sites.
Although Microsoft’s Live Search does tend to be more responsive to page submissions, they don’t always index a site very quickly. The most responsive search engine may be Google. It may be Yahoo!. The point is that you have to watch all the search engines to see where the new site achieves visibility first. That will tell you where to focus your initial optimization fine tuning.
Least responsive – Knowing that Ask is not friendly to new sites is not good enough. You should be able to get content into Ask. What is your plan for achieving that? Do you understand what it takes? (Hint: If you think “links from hubs and authorities” then you don’t understand.) If your site is stuck in Google’s Supplemental Index, do you know what it takes to get into the main index? (Hint: If you think “quality links” then you don’t have a clue.)
Draw up a table of search engines and show where you have achieved high visibiilty, multiple top ten rankings, and where you have not. That chart tells you where you need to get to work.
Branding – Just creating brand awareness can help a new site grow traffic. Search engines don’t help you just by sending traffic. They can also help you by building brand visibility. Just because someone doesn’t click through on a search result listing today doesn’t mean they won’t click through tomorrow. People who repeat their queries (and there are many people do) over time are most likely repeating their searches because they use search engines like bookmarks or because they are looking for additional information on a topic. SEOs and frustrateted Webmasters are the only people who repeat queries just to see who ranks first.
You can use a search engine to build brand visibility by working with its PPC service, building strong organic listings, optimizing its Local Search directory data for your business, getting images and videos into its specialized search index, submitting relevant but currently interesting press releases that are picked up by its news search, and otherwise participating in secondary indexes maintained by the search engine.
But understand what those indexes look for, how long the data in their streams remains alive, and who uses them. Don’t just flood the search indexes with fluff because you read on a blog somewhere that it’s a good idea to do so. Simply launching your Web site is not newsworthy. Being the 15th person to bring out an eCommerce site for sock collectors is not newsworthy.
If you’re not a true innovator, no one wants to know about you. You have to build brand value on the basis of the service you provide; the fact you launched a Web site means nothing. If you have the first “care and maintenance for Purdue University’s Tricorder” Web site, that’s newsworthy.
Let me seem to digress for a moment. Here are some common questions with what should be common sense answers:
Should you set up a blog? – Only if you intend to publish unique content on tha blog that is relevant to your site on a regular basis. Regular may be hourly, daily, or weekly. Monthly don’t cut the mustard.
Should you include a blog on your Web site? – If that is where you want your blog to be, yes. While there is technically no correct SEO answer, you can certainly get free traffic by setting up a blog on a service that randomly sends users to member blogs. There are several such services that do so. If you set up the blog on your new Web site (or give it a domain of its own) be sure you get the blog’s RSS feed into good distribution services.
Should you distribute press releases and free articles? – That depends. Do you have anything to say other than how great you are, how wonderful your site is, and how well you’ll meet customer needs? Take your sales pitch out of your immortal prose and ask someone who has no vested interest in boosting your ego if they see any value in the content. A press release should be telling people about an interesting event. An article should be providing useful or entertaining information. If it’s all about you, your Web site, or your business, don’t waste your time.
The SEO community turned to press release distribution for a variety of reasons. Some of those reasons are still good. But if you legitimately want to get the news media’s attention, don’t assume that spending $300 for a PR Web service’s premium feed is going to do the trick. Either hire a PR expert to handle that campaign for you or pick up the phone and call the media directly. Or send them a personal letter.
Free article distribution sites have become associated in the common mind with spam, but people do occasionally read the primary archives. The quality of the content may not be very good overall, but most people can usually tell when someone is honestly sharing information and when someone is being self-promotional. You can establish credibility with a low-level audience through article distribution, but that should be a very small part of your visibility campaign.
Should you submit your site to directories? – Yes, but not to all directories, and not for the sake of getting links. Be as picky and selective about the directories where you seek listings as the best directories will be about listing new sites. Just because you read on an SEO forum or blog that you should submit your site to directories is about as stupid a reason for doing so as one can contrive. Do it because you believe the directory will send you traffic. A directory may give you a link, but that link may not be crawled and indexed for months.
Directory submission is not link building. Anyone who tells you otherwise doesn’t understand what really goes into link building.
Should I ask other sites to link to mine? – Do you know anyone with a Web site that would be willing to link to your new site? If so, then ask. Once you’ve exhausted your list of friends and relatives, you’re reduced to asking strangers for links. That’s a very inefficient way of getting links. Do people make it work? Sure. Some people do better than others. But it always helps to have a unique site that actually provides value in itself (that is, if all you have to work with is customer service, don’t waste your time asking strangers for links).
Should I link bait? – Do you know how to create link bait? If your Web site by itself isn’t already link bait, you’ve misunderstood what link baiting is supposed to be all about. Some people do add link bait to otherwise bland, cookie-cutter eCommerce sites. In my opinion, if you can create link bait, you should be doing that from the start, not after the site goes up. Link baiting is far more efficient than asking strangers for links, but most people cannot create link bait. At least not very effective link bait.
Should I use PPC? – I would. You’re launching a new site, you have no visibility, no traffic, and you need customers. What sane reason do you have for turning away pre-qualified convertable traffic? If you don’t know how to set up and manage a PPC campaign, there are a lot of people out there selling their services. Pick one. Give them a shot. You’ll know within the first month if they can help you.
Should I visit forums and blogs and tell people about my site?. Nope. There is no sane reason to do this. It makes you look stupid, spammy, clueless, and unprofessional. If you don’t believe me, then start spamming the forums. BTW — we delete your links at SF-Fandom. I’m sure many other forums do, too. So why would you want to drop links in forums and blogs?
This is all about search engine optimization. Among the numerous myths that the SEO community has foisted upon reality is the nonsense idea that you have to have lots of links in order to achieve high rankings in competitive search results. Regrettably, many impressionable people who know no better than to look in various Internet marketing forums and blogs for help — having no clue as to who knows what they are talking about and who doesn’t — pick up on the most popular ideas and try to implement them.
Search engines index content, they rank content, and they present content to their visitors. They need links to find that content. They sometimes use data gathered from links to influence how they rank content. They sometimes ignore links altogether.
Do you know how to tell when links will help and when they won’t? If you don’t (and most people in the SEO community do not know), what is your plan B?
If you don’t have a plan B, then how can you possibly hope to create an effective search engine optimization campaign? You can try to rank on Google or you can choose the best search engine that helps your site. Succeeding with one search engine is preferable to succeeding with none and wishing you could rank well on Google.
Build a map, pick your best route to success, and follow that course. You’ll find that doing what works for you is far less time-consuming and fruitless than just following cookie-cutter blog and forum advice.
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