The Myths
You can be on the search engines top 10 list.
All you have to do is get a web site on the internet and sales will just start happening.
Once you submit to the search engines, then thousands of visitors will swarm to your web site.
You can pay someone $99 a month to market your site.
The Truth about Search Engines
Search Engine marketing is not everything it professes to be. It certainly is not the traffic producer that you have been told it is. Search engines are important, but they should only be a small part of your marketing efforts. You need to be able to submit to them, then forget them.
How are you going to beat out the other 3,000,000,000 (3 billion) web pages on the internet? Your web site is in competition, for a top listing, with every one of them. What do you have that they don’t? You are not going to beat them all!
There are no tricks that allow you, as a Web Site owner or webmaster, to ensure that your pages appear at the top of the search engine’s query result lists. If someone had figured out a way to influence the search engines and was using it, don’t you think the search engines would find out and correct the problem? These are robots we’re dealing with. Could they possibly look at grammar? Spelling? Frequency of word use? They are able tell if you have used repetitious keywords. I designed and wrote the code for the Zeus internet robot, I know the tricks.
Now don’t misunderstand me here, I’m not saying there aren’t professional web marketers out there that can’t influence the search engine query results. There are but they have spent years to learn their craft and have 1000s of hours of experience. I’m saying that kind of service and experience isn’t available to most of us webmasters trying to grab just a little piece of the traffic for ourselves. Even if we could find experts like that, we probably couldn’t afford them.
Stay clear of those marketers who only know how to submit your website over and over again. There is more to marketing than submitting. Honest web marketers will design a complete program that would be different than anyone else’s plan. It would be specialized to your website and your needs. Just as real-world businesses might need salespeople, magazine ads or perhaps sales counters, others might need only a catalog. Websites are the same as those real-world businesses except in this new world of the internet we don’t even know what we need and have to rely on the expert advice of others.
Building a lot of properly constructed web pages and having dozens of reciprocal links is the secret; not repeating keywords, resubmitting to a 1,000 link pages, resubmitting monthly or making extra fake pages. Spend your time and energy in giving the robots what they want. Prove to them your website is worth putting at the front of the pack.
If you have a lot of links to your web site, the robots will find you faster and more often, as they travel the Internet. They will spider your pages more often and they will believe your site is more popular than the others. This will also automatically submit your pages to search engines, with you never having to do that chore again, once you have the reciprocal links pointing to you. This will put you near the top of their listings.
Two simple concepts for your web site’s success.
Create traffic to your site
Have content to make them come back
Four Steps to get visitors to your site:
1. Build a lot of properly constructed Web Pages using GOOD keywords.
2. Submit them to the search engines correctly.
3. Check that they are in the search engines WHEN they should be.
4. Get as many Reciprocal Links as possible!
Robot Travel
If there is one thing I have learned about robots, it is that there is absolutely no pattern to them. Most robots are stupid and wander randomly. For example, 50% of robot hits to my sites, ask for the robots.txt page and then go away never asking for anything else. Then they come back a week later, ask for the same thing and then go away, again. This happens over and over again for months. I have never figured it out. What are they doing? If they wanted to see if the website was really a web site, they could just Ping it. This would be much faster and much more efficient. They seldom visit another page and if they do, they ask for one other page every visit or so. Some come in and issue rapid-fire requests for every page in the website. How rude! You have to quit worrying so much about robots. It takes 6 months before they request enough pages to do you any good. I really quit thinking about them a long time ago. Build a lot of pages correctly and, if you have reciprocal links to them, the robots will find them someday.
Try this: Go to AltaVista and type into the search box link:YourSite.com (Leave off the www). This will list the reciprocal links to your web site. Try link:crownjewels.com and you get 136 links to it. Think about this now: The robots say to themselves, “Here is a site that must be popular or why would so many websites SIMILAR to it have it’s link on their pages?” Remember that only SIMILAR sites with SIMILAR THEMES would probably have a link to your site. They give more importance to this than you submitting your link to them. Wouldn’t you?
Go to heavily trafficked sites matching your web site’s Themes and use AltaVista to find out how many reciprocal links they have. This will prove to you I am right.
Search engines are nothing more than links to your site. The problem is, you are constantly having to fight for your positioning in the search query listings. Forget about that. Leave the fighting to people who are able to spend 24 hours a day trying to trick everybody. Quit trying to compete with the large organizations pouring millions into their marketing. Completely forget about Search Engine positioning and go after the reciprocal links. The Search Engines will then believe you are a heavily visited site because you will be. You will now be getting the traffic you so richly deserve.
Search engine visitors to your site, are often-times not qualified visitors. Too many visitors pop into your home page for 2 seconds and then leave. You know how it is. We all do it when we are using the search engines. Either it wasn’t the information we were looking for, or they had this huge graphic on this stupid portal page, which just took forever to load. These visitors shouldn’t even count, but they get counted as 12-18 hits in your server logs. Hits are requests to the server. One page request can incur a lot of hits: requests to the page itself plus the graphics, each count as a hit.
Reciprocal links bring in qualified visitors. These are visitors who were already on a web site which had matching Themes to yours. They already have a good idea of what type of site you are. They will come into your site and actually stay awhile. These visitors should count as double credit, they are so good.
I know which type of visitor I would rather have.
How do you get people to WANT to put your link on their web sites? Why would a similar site put a link to your site on theirs? Simple, you have similar Themes. You are similar, but not competition.
There is one very important lesson to be learned from this crazy robot behavior. You need to make the navigation in your web site so easy that a visitor can find any page within 2 clicks of your home page. One way of doing this is installing hidden DotLinks. Dotlinks are little periods that are linked to other pages which are not really noticeable on your page if you put it as a period. Although they are not easily seen by the human eye, they are a link that a robot can follow] in your web site. When you do this, robots can find your pages faster and more easily.
Giving the Robots What They Want
So how do you make the search engine robots give your site a better rating than all the other millions of websites trying to do the same thing? Simple, give them what they want. You can’t trick them or make them think that you are better than you are. Think about a visit from the eyes of a robot. He finds a site, usually from links embedded in web pages, then loads the text from the first page.
He looks for the META tags and pulls out the keywords and description. If not there he takes the first 200 or so characters of text and uses them as a description.
The Title is extracted.
He extracts the pure text from the page (strips out the HTML coding). He takes out the common words leaving what he feels may be keywords. (Most do not do this last step.)
He now extracts the hyperlinks collating them into those that belong to this website and those that don’t (He visits these later as this is how he finds new websites).
He may do the same with the email addresses.
He goes on to the next page and so on until he has visited all of the pages in your web site.
Now he stores all of this information.
He now knows how many pages you have, how many ‘outside hyperlinks in your site’, and can give your site a score based on how it is set up. These are the basics.
What do they do with the info? When someone comes to search a phrase or keyword, another search routine program takes over using the information the robot found. A person types in the keywords and the search program returns the 256,000 pages matching their keywords. BUT they also consider the following: How old is the website or how long has the engine known about it? How large is the website? Was it properly constructed? How many hyperlinks are there to outside websites?
VERY IMPORTANT! How many hyperlinks are located on other websites to this site. The older and better the website the more links to it.
These robots know when you are cheating. You can’t trick them. It is so simple for the robot developer to incorporate code to negate the tricks. What about scoring keywords only once or twice per page or area like meta, title, etc? Is this page close in size to all the other portal pages? How many web pages in the same directory have the word “index” in them? Does this site have a lot of content? Is any text the same color as the background? Are there links to outside sites? Each page can be checked and compared against what the robot feels is a statistically normal page. These are computers you know.
You need a lot of pages with normal content. Instead of spending the time to make fake pages, give the real ones content. This will also give your visitors something to come back to. CONTENT.
The author of this article is David Notestine, the creator of the Zeus Internet Marketing Robot, rapidly being recognized as the best automated website marketing software on the Internet. His radical views are being embraced by webmasters throughout the web, as the truth about website marketing. Mr Notestine is also the creator the world’s first collective search engine: www.zeuscollective.com.
Zeus, an easy-to-use, intelligent, Internet marketing robot that builds a search link directory and creates reciprocal links for your web site. A totally new concept in generating web traffic, this revolutionary software product has features and benefits that enable it to create traffic to your web site, in numbers beyond your wildest dreams. One good reciprocal link can give you the same traffic as a major search engine and, with a Zeus robot, you can have thousands of reciprocal links. Zeus generates both new and return visitors to your web site.
To visit David’s site: http://www.cyber-robotics.com
Content has been reprinted with permission of the author. First appeared in http://www.cyber-robotics.com 1999-2000 David Notestine, all rights remain with author.
