An old can of worms...Search Engines

Hi Tony,

>I'm sure this topic has been discussed at least a half billion times, but
>there are days I'm at a loss for words with our clients on the subject of
>search engines and "why aren't we number one?"

>My specific questions; are most of you handling search engine placement and
>optimization within your company or do you outsource that service?

I specialize in getting clients listed in search engines at no cost to the client and have managed to get in the backdoor of several major search engines even for commercial sites.

My major focus is to get a site designed so it will be approved by ODP--Open Directory Project (follow their guidelines). They use human editors and only list the best sites. If you can get approved by ODP you can be approved most anywhere. Then it is usually picked up by several search engines, including Google, Lycos, AOL, AltaVista, etc. and ODP is constantly buying out the smaller engines so I make sure I also register the site on the newer engines/directories that look promising (study several search engine newsletters). I managed to get into Wisenut a few days before it was bought up by Looksmart. This kind of research takes a lot of time and effort and you have to keep on top of it constantly because these engines/directories change hands often.

I used to put out a lot of JavaScript mouseovers in the menu, and other wingdings and found out that when I removed them my web hits quadrupled overnight and search engines picked up my site a lot faster without them so I'm redesigning my sites now to just using links and discourage my clients from using fancy wingdings (explaining why). I refuse to work on 100% dynamically driven sites because it's too hard to get them into most engines/directories. I also refuse to list sites by any other method than manually. Takes about 2 hours to do a proper job on about 30 engines and directories that I utilize. I usually have to do it twice more over a span of a few months to get most engines to list it.

Most of my sites rank in the #1 or #2 position for their top keywords in Google.com because I stick to the rules that search engines prefer. 

Adhering to those guidelines my newest site was picked up in 10 days by Google and Overture and I didn't even register with Overture. My own site was just listed by Yahoo and I haven't paid for their services  and Looksmart has picked up another commercial site I designed and I didn't pay for their services either. 

It takes longer to get the desired results with this method but if your clients are on a limited budget then this is a viable alternative.

I have written an article how to get listed on search engines on my web site.

Lori Eldridge
Lori's Web Design
http://www.loriswebs.com

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