Specialists in Internet Web Sites Since 1995
Online Marketing for Book and Publishing Web Sites:
Step 5, Site Rank Evaluation
© 2001 Virginia Lawrence, Ph.D. While we are marketing our sites, we must
measure the success of our efforts, use that information to improve our
methods, and update our marketing plans. Although there are myriad marketing
schemes, most marketing starts with good search engine placement. To evaluate
the results of our search engine marketing, we must audit our site’s
standing in the most important search engines. We want to know what happens
when someone searches on our most important keywords. Does our site come up #1
in the listing? Or is our site #3,462?
Every site owner would prefer that when someone searches on his keywords,
the site appears on the first page of the listing for that keyword. Achieving
that goal is not a one-step process, since the individual search engines
categorize sites in different ways. To make our quest even more fun, the search
engines change their selection algorithms frequently, and they are constantly
receiving new registrations, so our site’s standing can change from day to
day.
The top search engines to visit include: Google, AltaVista, LookSmart,
NorthernLight, Yahoo, Hotbot, and Open Directory.
Researching a Site's Search Engine Ranking
We can do the research inexpensively by simply going to each search engine
and searching for each keyword, then noting our site's position in the list.
This can take a while, but it is certainly a good way to begin researching our
site ranking. This method also has the advantage that we can see which sites
lie above ours in the ranking.
To save time, we can use one of several software programs to research our
site's ranking. The most popular of these is WebPositionGold from
www.positionsoftware.com.
If we find that our ranking is not high enough, we compare our site and its
meta tags to the competing sites listed higher than ours. Then we find a
legitimate way to improve our key words or description.
Paying for Higher Search Engine Ranking
One good way to improve ranking is to bid for ranking. The best name in
companies accepting bids for search engine ranking is
http://www.Overture.com. Overture.com supplies many
of the top search engines with their higher listings.
Overture.com lets us set up an account with $25 or more. Then we specify the
keywords and the amount we are willing to bid for those words, starting as low
as 5¢ per click. When our bid is higher than everyone else for a
particular keyword, our site appears #1 in the search engine rankings for that
word. We pay our bid price only when someone clicks on our listing to actually
get to our site.
Obviously, bidding for search engine ranking will be sensible only when our
site is selling something, and we expect to recoup our bidding investment. High
bids for popular keywords makes great sense for sites offering high-ticket
items such as hotel rooms, expensive jewelry, cars, etc. Bidding at a low level
on relatively esoteric keywords makes sense for less expensive products, such
as books. That is, a small book site would not bid on the keyword books,
because it would be far too expensive. However, the small book site could do
well by bidding on book topic keywords, such as grandparenting or Six
Day War.
However much marketing we do, we should evaluate the effect of our marketing
on our site's search engine ranking. It's very satisfying to see a site move
steadily upward in the search engine rankings.
~ Virginia Lawrence, Ph.D. is an Information Architect
who publishes both in print and online. Contact her at
virginia@cognitext.com.
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