Search Engines are probably the single most important element after building your website, and certainly the most difficult to understand. This will be a brief explanation of what they do and how they do it and how you can get your site into the top positions.

There are about 10 major search engines which account for about 98% of all searches on the Internet. Of these 10, Yahoo is possibly the best known perhaps the most important, and the most difficult to get your site registered with. Yahoo now charges a $299 fee to review your site. They will review your site within seven business days and then decide if they will accept it.

Each search engine has it's own criteria for ranking sites when keywords are entered into a search. These criteria include your keywords, and how many times they are repeated. Generally, the more the better, BUT if keywords are repeated too often, they will not list your site at all as punishment for spamming. They have criteria for the number of keywords in the text of your page, in the alt text, which is the text that pops up before an image has finished loading, in the heading text, (words or phrases can be tagged as heading 1,2,3,etc.), in your meta tags, (invisible text in the HTML coding of your webpage). Some search engines run case sensitive searches, some do not, and some favor a certain number of words on a page, a certain number of pages in a site, and a certain number of other sites that are linked to yours. Obviously since the criteria for each search engine is different and changes from time to time, this is quite maddening, though not impossible to deal with.

Some of the search engines actually "spider" (move through your site page by page, link by link until the whole site is indexed) your website, while others, notably Yahoo, are actually a database of what they choose to index. Yahoo is indexed entirely by human beings, which means someone actually looks at your site to see if it meets their standards and then indexes your site or not. If not, you may never know why. Yahoo also must be submitted to completely by hand and very carefully. Search engines in general take 2 weeks to 3 months to index your site once it's submitted, and very often repeat submissions are necessary, although submitting too often may also be penalized by removing your site from the index.

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Search Engine Optimization

What is search engine optimization? It is a process that improves the positions your website comes up in, when a search is done using specific keywords. So, exactly what is done to optimize a website for search engines? For starters some very thorough research. Multiple searches need to be done using keywords (and key "phrases") that you think most people would use to find a website like yours. Key phrases are actually far more effective, as single keywords tend to bring up hundreds of thousands of results, and the top 10-30 are the only ones that matter. Searches are done to determine which key phrases bring up the most relevant sites. The next stage is analyzing the websites that come up in the top 10 for each search engine. The top sites will be analyzed for all of the criteria mentioned above so that as many of those parameters as possible can be incorporated into the structure of your webpages. Obviously since there are different requirements for each search engine one page can't contain all the best elements for all the search engines. The webpage content and structure can be kind of generalized to try to please as many engines as possible, or you can create "specialized" pages. Specialized pages are individual pages designed to target specific search engines with specific keywords, and bring visitors to specific areas of your website. This means you might have different meta tags, keyword content and page titles on various pages, each specifically targeted to bring your site up on different search engines. By now you probably have some idea why optimizing your website for the search engines is a complex and demanding task that is as important as the site itself.

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Search Engine Optimization Costs

A basic, well planned search engine submission will cost about $100, and a good optimization program will cost from $50-$500 a month for a specified period of time, usually 4-6 months. This is a service that Site-Maker is qualified and happy to offer you. There are no magic bullets to bring your site into number one positions, but there are effective solutions to greatly improve your positions and increase traffic to your site. Search engines can be the most important element in bringing visitors to your website, but it takes time, monitoring, and deserves whatever amount of investment you can reasonably budget for this purpose. There are multitudes of companies that will offer you search engine submission to up to 1500 search engines for anything from free to $35 to $100. In most cases like these you may as well burn your money. A basic, intelligent submission will bring you some of the results you seek, and a reasonable investment in an aggressive program of search engine optimization can bring dramatic results.

Monthly Search Engine Re-Submission & Optimization Price Chart (Minimum 3 Month Contract)
Optimizing meta-tags. (keyword content and description tags) Optimizing webpage search engine content. (keyword content within text, heading tags, alt tags, link tags) Submission to search engines needing re-registration. (those search engines where your site is not coming up in the first 30, or not coming up at all)	$150-$500/mo. Depending on size of website, budget, etc.

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