The position of your website on the major search engines often plays a crucial role in how many people actually visit your website. According to a recent Forrester report, the channels by which people find someone's website break down as follows:

Based on such statistics (as well as our own experience with what works), we almost always recommend our Search Engine Promotion Program as the first step in marketing a website. (We also offer other online marketing services, as appropriate, such as email newsletters, banner ads, links from other sites, etc.)

• your site's access records, to determine the key phrases via which people are currently finding your site. (1 hour)
• the competition's websites,  to determine which key phrases are succeeding for them and how they have designed their pages. (2 hours)
• the pages on your site that have distinguishable content and could function well as "doorway pages" for promoting good key phrases (1.5 hours)*
• your own suggestions for additional key phrases to target.
• We then combine these studies to come up with a set of target phrases for the major search engines. (1.5 hours)

*Contact us for current hourly rates.

If your budget can accomodate it, more doorway pages usually bring better results – not surprisingly: each doorway page is bringing in traffic for a different word or phrase, and most market niches have a significant number of associated search-worthy phrases, in some cases, even hundreds. (For a good example, see below.)

Note: If you are not hosting with us, we will need FTP access to your site (and your permission to make inobtrusive changes to existing pages) in order to carry out this step.

TIME FRAME AND PAYMENT SCHEDULE

2 weeks (with how much we do in step B based on a dialog between you and us, after step A has been completed). Payment for step A due as initial deposit. Payment for step B due at completion of step B.

For those whose marketing budget is tight, we recommend our Detailed Page Optimization, at least on your home page.No new doorway pages are created, but your home page (or the page of your choosing) is tuned up for search engine promotion.

A. Research appropriate target phrases for maximal search engine visibility.

B. Modify your web page to specifically target the most important key phrases.

Note 1: If you would like to have more than one page optimized, we will only charge you once for research. So:

• optimizing 2 pages would be 3.5 hrs labor (1.5 hrs. research + 2 hrs page modifications);
• optimizing 3 pages would be 4.5 hrs labor (1.5 hrs. research + 3 hrs page modifications);
• etc.

Note 2: The pages you should consider submitting for our Detailed Page Optimization are "primary content" pages which emphasize (either through copy or graphics or both) topics that people might enter in the search engines. Examples of pages that are not "primary content" pages are: "Contact Us", "Links", message boards, guestbooks, sign-up form pages, etc.

If you'd like us to go through your site and recommend pages for optimization, we'd be happy to do so. We charge 2 mins. labor for each page we recommend.

Another program for those whose marketing budget is tight, is Quick Page Optimization. We skip the research (described in Detailed Page Optimization), and use our extensive search engine promotion experience to do a rapid "make-over" of that page, to make it more attractive to search engines relative to phrases that we surmise are the ones worth promoting via this page. Our "web page make-over" includes:

• Addition or tuning of keyword, description, and other meta tags
• Examination of your web page title, modification as appropriate
• Examination of 15 other critical areas of the page, modification as appropriate
  

Upgrade a particular page on your website for improved search engine visibility.

Note: The pages you should consider submitting for our Quick Page Optimization are "primary content" pages which emphasize (either through copy or graphics or both) topics that people might enter in the search engines. Examples of pages that are not "primary content" pages are: "Contact Us", "Links", message boards, guestbooks, sign-up form pages, etc.

If you'd like us to go through your site and recommend pages for optimization, we'd be happy to do so. We charge 2 mins. labor for each page we recommend.

Submit your site to the major search engines over a 12+ week period.

Because the search engines are always changing their rules of operation, we have developed a conservative approach, that takes a while, but gets the best results. Why the conservative approach? Because search engines can penalize you if you submit too many pages. So we test the waters, and only submit pages when that has been proven to be a reasonable option. Also it is advantageous to submit our "hallway page" (the page that has links to all the key pages on your site) first, because many search engines will then go ahead and index not only this page, but all the pages to which it links as well.

The major search engines we currently work with are:

• 7Search
• About.com / Sprinks
• Ah-Ha
• Alta Vista
• All The Web / Fast / Lycos
• AOL Web Sites
• Ask Jeeves / Teoma
• FindWhat
• Google
• HotBot
• Iwon
• Kanoodle
• Looksmart
• MSN
• Netscape
• OpenDirectory
• Overture (formerly GoTo)
• Xuppa
• Yahoo*

We adjust which search engines we focus on over time, based on which are the primary traffic producers.

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, a company that measures the impact of the Internet and new technologies on commerce and marketing, the top five search engines during January of 2003 were Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask Jeeves. The rankings take into account the percentage of the entire Internet population that visited each site (audience reach) and the average number of minutes spent per visitor at each site. These numbers were adjusted to exclude non-search portal traffic such as email retrieval.

1. Google. The number one ranked search engine according to Nielsen/NetRatings was Google. Its audience reach was 29.5% and it had an average visit length of 28.5 minutes. To confirm that your site is in the Google database go to the Google search page and type your URL into the search field.
2. Yahoo. Nielsen/NetRatings's number two ranked search engine was Yahoo. Its audience reach was 28.9% and it had an average visit length of 11.0 minutes. To confirm that your site is in the Yahoo database go to the Yahoo search page and type your URL into the search field.
3. MSN. The number three ranked search engine according to Nielsen/NetRatings was MSN. Its audience reach was 27.6% and it had an average visit length of 8.7 minutes. To confirm that your site is in the MSN database go to the MSN search page and type your URL into the search field.
4. AOL. The fourth largest search engine in the Nielsen/NetRatings study was AOL. Its audience reach was 18.4% and it had an average visit length of 38.8 minutes. To confirm that your site is in the AOL database go to the AOL search page and type your URL into the search field.
5. Ask Jeeves. Rounding out Nielsen/NetRatings's top five search engines was AskJeeves. Its audience reach was 9.9% and it had an average visit length of 10.2 minutes. To confirm that your site is in the Ask Jeeves database go to the Ask Jeeves search page and type your URL into the search field.

The exact time required for STEP 4 in our Search Engine Promotion Program is a little hard to predict. The search engines to which we'll be submitting do updates anywhere from every 2 days, to every 6 weeks, and occasionally longer periods whose length is unpredictable; if we are very fortunate, an update for every search engine will occur shortly after we do a submission.

*Yahoo's directory entry is very difficult to change once a site has been submitted, so we generally only submit it for you if it hasn't been submitted already.

When it is relevant, we also identify and re-design any existing web pages that:

a. are currently linked to by top-30 listings on some major search engine; but

b. are not suitable as entry points into your current site design
(i.e., they were part of an older version, but are still listed on the search engines)

TIME FRAME AND PAYMENT SCHEDULE

10 or more weeks, with results appearing as early as 2 days. 50% deposit due up front. Balance of payment due upon completion of the 10+ week period.

Some of the major search engines tend to be fairly stable in their listings. For example, your listings on Yahoo will tend to stay very steady. Other listings may even tend to get better with time; for example Alta Vista tends to give a higher rating to older listings. For other search engines, your listings will tend to persist, but gradually decline over time without further care, as the engine itself changes, and as competitors add or improve their own listings. Still other search engines are more volatile, and tend to require constant care. However, all search engines are potentially unpredictable, and all have been known to do unpredictable things (such as suddenly dropping your listings altogether), either frequently or infrequently.

The statistics for any given search engine over months of time are almost never just a steady increase. Sometimes a change in that search engine will drop a site completely off the search engine, and new work must be done to ascertain the reason, as well as the best way to getting good listings again on that engine. This is why we recommend our monthly or bi-monthly maintenance program, whose purpose is to keep the numbers up there, and when possible, increasing.

So the long term behavior that we strive to achieve is not a "steady upward curve" – which is impossible given the constantly changing search engines, and, secondarily, with the competition always doing their own search engine promotion work – but one that looks more like the usual profitability curves (for the same reason), responding to the problems that inevitably arise, and bouncing back even better:

offers a Basic Maintenance Program whose features include:

1. Focus on maintaining your current listings on the major search engines.
2. Improvement of your listings where possible.
3. Re-submission of your web page(s) as often as is appropriate, for maximum benefit.
4. Tracking of the visitors to your site, the search engines that brought them there, and the phrases they used.
5. Updating of metatags and other page contents in response to the tracking described in (4).
6. Exploiting a lot of very specialized knowledge about how to get the best results for each search engine.

In comparison, most maintenance programs perform (1), (2), and (3), but not (4) and (5). In other words: they don't necessarily connect what they do with the actual traffic to your site.

Our Basic Maintenance Program is best applied after we have already optimized your web pages – either through our top-of-the-line Search Engine Promotion Program, or any of the other options listed in our Marketing Service Table – but it can also be done by itself.

Our basic monthly program can be extended or customized in all kinds of ways. Talk to us about what would best work to promote your business.

*Total time varies with each client and the associated services

Villas International – Over 25,000 worldwide vacation rentals, from the second oldest international vacation rental company in the United States. "Experience the world from the inside."

Our promotion of Villas International: 1999-2002 We have used 250 doorway pages and 16 "mini-websites", and have tracked 500 key phrases.

TOP-RANKED LISTINGS OF KEY SEARCH PHRASES

VISITORS PER DAY