How Do I Get My Site Listed with the Search Engines?

The first question to answer is which engines should you try to get listed with. You'll see many companies on the web that will "submit" your site to 100's of search engines for a fee. Truth is, there are only a few that you really need to deal with since they "feed" most of the other search engines.

Google and Yahoo have many other search engines as affiliates. For example, AOL's search engine is actually Googles! And MSN has been powered by Yahoo. In fact, Yahoo powers AltaVista, Excite, Go2Net, InfoSpace, MSN, Sympatico.ca, Juno, Netzero, Dogpile, Metacrawler, Web Crawler, and AlltheWeb, among others.

And Google powers AOL, Netscape, Earthlink, At&T Worldnet, AskJeeves, Lycos, InfoSpace, iVillage, and many more.

So, you see if you get listed on just Google and Yahoo you are actually listed on more than 20 of the largest search engines. What about the other 100's of search engines? They don't really amount to much and probably aren't worth the effort.

There are two types of listings: Free and Paid.

Paid listings are the ones that say "Sponsored" above them. They are normally at the very top of a page, on the right side of a page, and sometimes at the bottom of pages.

Free listings are the others on a page. Free listings are great because they are free! However, you are competing with all of the other pages on the web for a rank in the listings. In order to move your site up in the listings you have to optimize your pages for search engines. In reality, you have two different "customers" for you site: the people you want to go to your site, and the search engines you want to rank your site. In order to reach both, your pages need to be designed for both.

Paid Listings

Paid listings are used by many businesses on the web, including us. We get about 33% of our sales through paid listings. We also get about 33% through free listings. It took about 12 months for our free listings to get to the top of Google. It took about 1 hour to achieve high rankings on Google’s paid listings, and a couple of days for Yahoo’s paid listings. An hour or a few days versus many months!

So, don't be quick to count out the paid listings! It is a quick way to jump-start sales on your site while your free listings are moving up the rankings. The bottom line is that it takes both methods to succeed with online selling.

Are Paid Listings for me?

First of all, if you aren’t selling something on your site, you probably don’t want to use paid listings. However, if you’ve got the money and want to share you site, have at it!

Which search engine should I start with?

You’ll want to start with Google. Yahoo uses their Overture service for paid listings. They are slow, have real people examine and reject your ads, aren’t very consistent, and are generally way behind Google. Oh, and Overture requires $1,000 to start an account…almost forgot that important point. The reason you'll be able to get listed on Yahoo/Overture in a few days is because of the success you'll have on Google first.

How to Start

To start, go to Google and sign up for their AdWords service. Follow their instructions and you'll be listed on Google and the other search engines they supply. We aren’t going to provide a tutorial here for AdWords since Google does such a fine job. What we will do is give you enough info to understand what it is all about and if it is for you.

How much does it cost?

It costs as much as you want to spend, or as little.

It works as an auction. You bid on keywords and keyword phrases. In essence, whoever pays the most gets top billing. Google, however, takes other things into consideration; how relevant your site is to the keywords you're bidding on, how many other sites link to your site (relevant sites), how many people read your ad and click on it versus the other ads that are paying more than you. So, it is possible, with Google, to be first in the rankings and not pay the most.

You get charged every time someone clicks on your ad and goes to your site. This is called a click-through. The minimum bid is $0.10 (ten cents) and can go as high as you like. You can also specify a daily budget that you'd like to live within. This is what makes it affordable, if you want to try it out for $10 per day, you can do it. You won't get as many click-throughs as you would if you spent $50 per day, but you'll see the percentage of people who click through and you can use that to predict how many would click through if you spent more money. For example, if you had a $10 budget, a $0.10 bid and got 100 clicks and 2,000 people saw your ad, you'd have a "click-through-rate" of 5%, which is pretty good. So, if you increased your budget to $50, you could expect five times as many clicks.

This is not always true in practice, because there may not be enough people out there searching for your keywords to result in five times as many clicks. At some point you’ll run out of people and clicks. Increasing and decreasing your budget will help you find the right budget.

What do I do?

The first thing to do is go through the articles we have on Online Marketing. One of the main things you’ll get from these articles is a method to determine what keywords people search for when looking for a site like yours. These keywords are the key to your success on the web.

Once you have your set of keywords and phrases, and you should try a lot, like hundreds, you’ll create ads for your products or services. These ads are what people see when they enter your keywords. You can create one ad and have all your keywords display that ad, or you can create an ad for each of your keywords. Google has found that if you use the keywords in the title of the ads, your click-through-rate will be higher.

Once you have a keyword and an ad you’ll use Goggle’s tools to see how much other people are bidding on that keyword. You can actually decide how high you want to be in the rankings this way. In any event, you’ll decide what to bid.

You do this for all of they keywords you want to use. Once you’ve got them all entered you’re done. Well, not really.

What’s Next?

You will now be getting clicks to your site from many people and it will cost you money. You’ll want to monitor your keywords, ads, money, and click-through-rates to ensure you are spending money wisely. You’ll want to check to see if some of your ads aren’t doing well, and if not, you may want to change the ad. You can measure the effectiveness of your changes by watching the click-through-rate. If it goes up, your did a good job, if it went down…

You may want to eliminate keywords that aren’t doing well so you can reallocate the money being spent on those to keywords that are doing better.

The main thing you’ll want to do is to be able to determine what keywords and ads are resulting in actual sales of your products or services. Google and Overture/Yahoo each have methods to do this. Google calls it “Conversion Tracking”, Overture calls “Conversion Counter”. They will give you some HTML to add to the “confirmation” page on your site. This is the page people land on once their sale is complete. With this HTML in place, you’ll be able to tell not only which ads and keywords pull in more people but which ones result in sales.

What about Overture and Yahoo?

Once you have yourself up and running with Google, you’ll want to turn to Overture. Many of the concepts used by Google are used by Overture as well so the transition isn’t that painful. There is that $1,000 up-front fee to think about. Google works a bit differently here, they charge your credit card every week. Overture takes your $1,000 and uses it to pay for the clicks, and when your account gets low it takes another $1,000 or so. Overture will tell you the actual amount they will charge when your account gets low.

There are a few other differences. Overture won’t let you use more one ad per keyword, Google lets you have as many as you like. This helps you see which ads work better. Google lets you specify how keywords have to be entered. For example, using Web Studio as a keyword or phrase results in your ad being shown when a person types in anything that contains the two words Web and Studio. If you use “Web Studio” (with the quotes) your ad will be shown when a person types in anything that contains the words in that order. And finally if you use [Web Studio], it will result in the ad being shown only when they type those two words, in that order, without any other words.

These are actually very powerful features of Google and lets you fine tune your ads and keywords (fine tune = save money). With Overture they have their “Advanced Match” and “Standard Match”. Standard responds to exact matches of your keywords, along with singular and plural variations, along with common misspellings. The Advanced match requires that the words in your keyword appear in the user’s search in any order. So, if they type “Car used in James bond Movie” and your keyword is “used car”, you’ll get a match. This doesn’t seem very advanced to us, because the whole idea of this is to narrow down the people who come to your site to those who are interested in exactly what you have. So, be aware of the differences in these features.

One other difference is that Google has automated the review of ads and keywords while Overture uses human editors. This takes time. It is also error prone. Overture’s automated keyword suggestion tool told use to use “best web design software”, so we did. Overture’s editors then rejected “best web design software” about a week later because of the use of the word “best”. They don’t allow superlatives. We’ve also had one editor tell us to change a word in an ad and resubmit it. Once we resubmitted it, a different editor told us the new word was not acceptable and suggested we use the original word the other editor disapproved. Going around in circles like this takes time. This is why we suggest using Google first and then moving to Overture; much of this circular motion will be avoided because of the success (debugging) you’ll have on Google.

What’s Next

Next, go to Google, click on “Advertising Programs” and then click on “Google AdWords”. Read all about AdWords and when you understand it, review our articles on keywords and create a great set of keywords. Bring them back to AdWords, enter them, create your ads, get set up for conversion tracking and get yourself online.

Then, use the tools Google and Overture give you to analyze your ad program. Make small modifications and wait to see what difference they make. Don’t make too many changes at once because you won’t be able to tell what worked and what didn’t work. The object of this is to continually tweek everything until you are getting the most clicks, most ad views (also called impressions), highest click through rate, and most importantly highest conversion rate from clicks to sales.

Good luck!