Prepare to Enter the Place of Lost Souls

(Just kidding...!)

Search engines can be one of the most exciting and challenging aspects of running an Internet business. For many of you, if not all, what you are about to move into is going to feel overwhelming. It's true. You just have to take on faith that if you stick with this you will exclaim, as many of our students have, "This is easy!

And for Now...

You are going to feel like I have dropped you off in the middle of China with no compass and no English/Chinese Dictionary, so hang on!

Search Engine Watch

The best site on the Internet to learn about search engines is Search Engine Watch.

This is the best site on the Internet, by far, to learn about search engines. It has TONS of free information on search engines, how they work, ideas on how to get them to work for you, etc.

• When you go there, click on Search Engine Submission Tips.

• On that page you will see a number of links. Those links will take you to articles on various aspects of search engines, how they work and how to get them to work for you.

• The most important group of articles you should read at this point is at the top of the page under the sub-headline "Essentials of Search Engine Submission."

• You can read these articles online, print them all out, or just print out the ones you find most important to you.

You could not buy a book with money or blood that is as good as this information you are getting for free (not counting the time, ink and paper). It will be well worth your education to print all this out, stick the pages into a 3-ring binder, read and study this week.

This is Really Important You Understand

I do not expect you to understand every word printed here; there will be no pop quiz when we meet next; after reading this information I will not expect you to your master thesis. So, everyone put away your Perfectionist and just go and get it done.

All I want you to do is to get your feet wet about this material...that is it. So, you have no excuse not to just get through it.

This is your priority assignment for the week!

Enjoy!

WPG and the WPG Manual

The application of the information you learn at Search Engine Watch will be applied in the web tools at WPG. If you want to get a preview of this great software you can Download your free trial. and print out the online manual and faqs at the WebPositionGold site.

Search Engine Sites

To build your knowledge about Search Engines, do the exercise on this link, going to each of the main search engines and printing out their help/info pages.

Submitting Your Site

Review each search engine and go through the process of submitting your site to each of the major ones, if your site is ready. Actually, you're site probably is not ready at this point in all the ways it needs to be for the search engines. But so what! Submitting it now, will not hurt.

Electronically Submitting Your Site

As you may know now, there are companies that will electronically submit your site to the search engines - hundreds even thousands.

As you will learn, there is a difference between submitting your site to the search engines and optimizing your site for the search engines.

But before you do...

Study the information below about meta tags, etc., you find at Search Engine Watch. You will be learning a lot more about these in the coming weeks.

But to kick things off, review and apply the data below if you wish to get you site submitted now. As you learn more, you will be doing tweaking and refining.

Meta Tag Generators

Meta tags, as you will read in Search Engine Watch, can be an important part of getting the search engines to work for you.

I am not all that into meta tag generators, as I believe there are better ways to come up with your meta tag key words and phrases.

Meta Tag Key Words

After studying Search Engine Watch, you can begin brainstorming your key word list.

Brainstorm your list of key words Write out a list of key words and phrases you believe visitors would use to find your website. Keep this list as you will be adding to it and refining it.

Your meta description should be approximately 25 words, about 150 characters (including spaces). Your meta description is what appears in the indexed list of sites after a search engine does a search. You should write it as sales copy, so it should be a grabber telling the visitor what you are going to do for them (benefits), with possibly an offer.

As a way to help you come up with meta tag keywords, check out the online web tools at Word Tracker and Word Spot.

Studying the Search Engines

If you get done with the reading at Search Engine Watch, are still in the possession of your brain and are ready for more, take on the information at the links below. These links can change from time to time so if you get a dead link or it goes to the wrong page, do me a favor and shoot me an email.

• Click on the link by each search engine name. It will take you to their Help/Information page.

• Print out the help information for that search engine.

• Print out those pages and put into your search engine notebook.

Search Engines Links

1. Excite

2. Altavista

3. HotBot

4. Netscape

5. WebCrawler

6. Goto

7. Google

8. MSNSearch

9. Northern Light

10. NBCi

11. AOL

12. Ask.com

15. LookSmart

16. DMOZ Open Directory

Pay Per Click Search Engines

You will find there is a growing trend today for a new kind of Search Engines, pay per clicks. I do not recommend you get into these right way. (Yahoo Search Marketing.com may be an exception for some of you, depending on your products/services.)

You can read up on these search engines at Pay Per Click Search Engines

Search Engines – Exercises

After reading and studying the information at Search Engine Watch, and perhaps Search Engines, you are ready to roll up your sleeves and see how the information translates into practice for marketing results.

Focusing on Key Words and Key Word Phrases

Here is a great tool to help you with your key word phrases search. It is the Google's SEO Book at SEOBooks' Keyword Suggestion Tool.

It will give you a list of similar key words and phrases with their counts from different sources. This will give you a better idea of which key words and phrases you could use for your site, blogs, social networking sites, etc.

The Under the Hood Exercise

Now that you better understand search engines and how they work and why, you are ready to get into the practical application study.

You will be examining what actually goes on with the search engines, and from that take what you learn and use on your own business website.

• Select a key word phrase you have committed to for one of your main pages, preferably the phrase for your main (home/index) page. This key word phrase will be the phrase you will use throughout this exercise.

• Now, going to each search engine, one at a time, and type in the selected key word phrase into the search field and begin a search. An indexed list will be brought up. Starting with the first link that has been brought up in the indexed list, click on that link and begin the Under the Hood Exercise. (For this exercise, DO NOT EXAMINE THE LINKS UNDER THE POPULAR LISTINGS OR ARTICLES.)

• Look for the selected key word phrase/key words on that page, where those words are and how many times they appear on the page. You might want to print out this page so you can highlight those words and where they appear on that page. You can use your "Find" located on your "Edit" tool on your tool bar at the top of your browser.

• Next View Source. (View Source can be accessed by placing your cursor somewhere on the web page where no images or text appear. Right clicking your mouse. For Mac users click your mouse button and hold it down. A menu will appear. From that menu select View Source and left click. A page will come up, probably in notepad, that shows the programming of that page.

• In View Source, examine the Meta Tag Description and the Meta Tag Key Words. You might want to make a list of them for your reference later. These will give you ideas as to how those words are being used by this site for the search engines. Again, you can use the "Find" tool to find those key words and phrases on this page.

• This, too, is a page you might want to print out for reference. (BTW - If you cannot find the meta tag key words and phrases on the page, you are probably looking at a cloaked page. A cloaked page is a practice that has become illegal on search engines as its purpose is to deceive the search engines.)

• Next, look for key words in the URLs of the links on that page.

• Look for key words in the alt files. (Alt files are the image files. You will see this kind of coding often in the image source command.)

• Do this exercise for the top 10 sites listed for each search engine, looking for patterns.

• Then go and do this same exercise for number 30 in this listing. See what differences there may be between the top 10 and number 30. It may surprise you.

Doorway Pages

Here is a super article on doorway pages, a strategy that has been very successful when working with search engines to get great positions when indexed.

This is additional information to help you understand search engines and how to work with them. This is not an assignment to do at this point.

Dispelling the Myths About Doorway Pages by Brent Winters

With some people, you mention the term “doorway page” and they shudder. They say, “Aren’t those bad now? I heard somewhere the search engines don’t like them anymore.” However, this is only HALF true.

The truth is that representatives at some search engines do not like the TERM “doorway page” because some Web marketers have abused the concept and degraded the search experience for their users. In particular, search engines do not like pages that “lack significant content.” That’s why some Web marketers have started giving other names to their doorway pages such as “informational pages” to avoid the perception that doorways lack significant content.

However, as soon as enough people start using the term “informational page,” then that term will be perceived as bad and they’ll move onto a new name. Meanwhile, Web novices are bombarded by an ever changing and ever growing list of Web marketing terminology. Fun huh?

The key here is to understand what a doorway page is, at least as we’ve always defined it. A doorway page is quite simply any page that is designed to appeal to a given search engine so that it will rank well. The term “doorway” refers to the fact that any page a visitor travels to from the search results to your site acts as an entrance, or doorway to your Web site. This could be your home page, but quite often it is another page. Does this mean that page inherently has little or no content on it?

Of course not. It means it was the page on your site that was the most applicable to the user’s search at least from the search engine’s point of view. In fact, do a search on any search engine. Essentially, every page you find in the top 30 is an example of a doorway page if you ignore pages not ranked on page content, like directory listings.

It’s important to understand that there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to design your page so that it will be liked by the search engines. In fact, most of the search engines have tutorials with basic tips on how to create a good page. AltaVista, famous for it’s anti-doorway page propaganda, has an extensive tutorial on how to make AltaVista-friendly pages and even how to improve your rankings. You can see it at:

Therefore, no matter what the prevailing myths are about “doorways,” they are not inherently “bad.” In fact, failing to optimize your pages for a search engine will only create pages that the search engine does NOT like to see. Ironic huh?

What is bad is when you either purposely or accidentally break the rules of a search engine. This can happen whether you’re consciously creating a doorway page or not. So what are these rules? Unfortunately that is a moving target.

Why do you want to be search engine friendly? If you’re not, you will not rank in the top 10 to 30 matches and nobody will ever find your site, at least not through the search engines.

What kind of things do the search engines NOT want to see? This varies somewhat by the engine, but in general the major things are:

1. Do not optimize for keywords that are not directly related to your Web site’s content. This might seem obvious, but some Web marketers and even some positioning agencies still abuse this rule.

2. Do not repeat the same keyword too many times on the page.

3. Do not use the same color text as your background color.

4. In general, avoid redirects and meta refresh tags. There can be valid uses for a redirect such as when your Web site has moved to a new address and you wish to automatically redirect the user to the new site. Therefore, the search engines are cautious about banning a Web site for simply using a redirect.

What many of them don’t like, however, is when you try to serve up one page to the search engine to index and another page to the user doing the search. This technique removes the ability of the search engine to rank the pages according to their own ranking algorithms. Sometimes this is referred to as page cloaking or IP redirection. If they catch you doing this, you could be banned.

5. Avoid duplicating content. Some engines have spiders that will look for duplicate or near-duplicate content on the same Web site or across multiple Web sites. When they find it, they may ban both sites or flag it for human review.

6. Last, but certainly not least, search engines want to see quality content that their users will find valuable. Unfortunately, quality is often subjective.

What I believe contributes to a negative perception that doorway pages are bad are poor optimization techniques by Webmasters. Ideally, one should optimize a site by taking existing content rich pages and fine-tuning them according to what the search engines want to see.

This is often easy for Web site owners who have a mastery over their site’s subject matter. However, trouble comes in when a Webmaster or a consulting company starts throwing together sentences and paragraphs just to fill space. They may not have a clue about how to write good marketing copy or what the Web site is really all about.

The key is, does the page “sell” the visitor on your product or service? Does it look professional? If not, people will click-away from your site as quickly as they arrived.

Therefore, if you put someone else in charge of optimizing your Web site, make sure a skilled marketer evaluates these pages for quality and professionalism. If you don’t, you may be scratching your head at why the visitors arrive but they don’t buy anything.

In conclusion regarding doorway pages, apply the concept of a doorway page since you must have search engine friendly pages to be found.

However, if you e-mail questions to the search engines, avoid using any search engine marketing terminology whether it be doorway pages, gateway pages, hallway pages, or even “informational pages.”

If you’re reporting a problem with your listing, describe how correcting it would benefit their users. The search engines care about providing relevant search results to their users, but they are not necessarily concerned about how you as an individual rank. Keep that in mind and you’ll be better equipped the next time you communicate with them.

Here's a GREAT Site!

Check out the site Spider-Food and read the links on Doorway and Gateway pages. There is a lot of information here, so give yourself some time. You will probable want to come back to it again it's that good.

Creating a Doorway Page

1. Create a Doorway page by creating a new Internal Page.

2. Bring up second browser. Position one browser so it takes up the top half of your monitor and the second browser takes up the bottom half. Both of these browsers should show the login area of your website.

3. One of the browsers will show the new Internal page you just created. The second browser will show your Home page.

4. Field by field copy the information in the home page and paste it into the appropriate field in the Internal page.

5. Complete the copy and paste process for all the fields.

6. Save Changes for the Internal page.

7. Now you are ready to run your page through the WPG tools, mentioned in the prior lesson.

Hallway Pages

Hallway Pages are similar to gateway pages in that they are designed to be submitted to the search engines. The difference is that the content of a Hallway Page is links on the page that go to other pages on your site or other websites.

The Benefits of Hallway Pages

There are benefits for both the visitor and you, as should always be the case when marketing on the Internet.

Benefits for the Visitor

Hallway Pages are beneficial for the visitor because they provide a directory of informational links to your site and other sites. That is what surfers on the Internet are looking for – information, that can lead to buying. And that information is provided in easy and convenient ways for the visitor.

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