Are Search Engines Really an Integral Part of Your Marketing Plan?

Over the last couple of years a lot of people have made a lot of money convincing Internet Marketers like you and I that we NEED a Top Ten ranking in the major search engines. I'm going to let you in on a well-kept secret. It just isn't so! Of all the many millions of sites on the Internet, with thousands springing up every day, you probably have better chances of winning the lottery. And a lottery ticket is a whole lot cheaper.

So, here's the real deal on Search Engines: Forget about Yahoo! Forget about Top Ten Rankings! Forget about specially crafting pages to cater to this or that specific engine. Do only what it reasonable, sensible and cost-effective and let the chips fall where they may!

Here are some real facts from personal experience that may interest you and put things in some sort of perspective. I have been submitting to most major search engines, once a month for the last two years using only SubZero and Worldsubmitter. Between them, they submit to about 300+ major engines and certainly include all the principal ones. Other than a couple of common sense 'tricks' that I have outlined below, I do nothing special other than making sure that keywords that I list in my keyword tags actually occur in the main part of the page.

On a day to day basis, I generate about 1000 visitors to my sites and affiliate pages. Less than 10% of that traffic is generated from search engines. More than 20% comes from FFA pages, that the so called gurus claim are worthless!! Here are some of the more surprising aspects of my own Search Engine experience:

Guru Talk: Pages with '.cgi' or '?' in their URL are ignored by major engines
My Experience: It's Free so I submit them anyway... and I get hits!!

Guru Talk: It's hard to get listed on Yahoo! You must jump through major hoops
My Experience: I never listed with Yahoo but still get referrals anyway!

Guru Talk: You must tailor your pages exactly for any specific engine!
My Experience: Who has the time or money? I still get hits from most of them.

Guru Talk: If you don't do things just right, you'll get banned by some engines
My Experience: When I started I knew none of the rules. I got hits anyway.

To sum up, don't be fooled by the experts and their gobbledygook. Follow some commonsense guidelines and you'll get results too.

Important Caution: Don't be tempted to submit your pages more than once a month, unless you have done a major overhaul on your site. Most engines will spider your site anyway and pick up the changes. I don't know if I have been banned by any engine yet but why tempt fate?

Pro Secret: If you can set yourself up to handle the deluge of E-mail confirmations, you can try this tactic. It is my belief that I got most of my attention from the search engines because I blitzed the FFA pages solidly for a couple of weeks with SubZero. Whenever an engine spidered an FFA page, one of my links was there and I could watch my 'link popularity' climb almost daily.

Pro Secret: I do a 'search and replace' on the footer that I include on every page. I change at least one character on each page once a month. This causes the update flag on that page to be set. Now when the friendly search engine spider comes by, it will think that every single page has been updated and will refresh the engine database with new dates.

Pro Secret: Because I use two ad tracking services, MSC-PRO PLUS and ROIbot, I can submit every page three times with 3 different urls, (its true URL and one for each tracking service). Again, some gurus will tell you that this is a no-no. All I can say is: It works for me.

I don't claim to be an expert and did not intend that this should be an exhaustive analysis of Search Engines. There are many who know much more about the subject, and if you want to take the time, we have included as a FREE resource the definitive Search Engine Tactics Manual which is very highly rated and has won many awards.

BONUS DOWNLOAD: Search Engine Tactics

STEP 6 To Do List:

What: Set up Submissions for each Important Page or Opportunity
How: Both Worldsubmitter and Subzero have easy to follow templates

What: Make an exclusion list in SubZero for sites that appear in Worldsubmitter also
How: Under the Search engine Selection tab in the 'Session' section move to 'Engine Ignore List'

What: Make a Submissions Log
How: Put them in your calendar to prevent duplicate submissions

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