Doing Your Own Search Engine Enabling?

Doing your own Search Engine Enabling is a good way to save money in your on-line/web site budget. Our best advise for doing it yourself is to dedicate yourself to following the steps as rigorously as possible, and understanding that you will need to put in the time to do it right. There are no short cuts to doing it yourself. Keep your expectations reasonable, be aware of current trends, and don't break the Search Engine (SE) rules!

Tips for SE Enabling:

Find Three Major Search Engines to Focus On
These will most likely be Google, Yahoo, and either MSN and AOL, depending on your target market. Once you find your SE's, figure out the rules. What will get you disqualified from a listing? What aren't you allowed to include in your meta tags? Do the SE you've picked query your site for search result qualifications or does it feed off another SE's database?

Research the Search Engine Results
Go to each SE you've chosen and find 5 sites that come up under what you think your keywords/phrases should be that you like with good result placement and read their meta tag content. If these sites are similar to yours, copy and paste this information into a report or spreadsheet that you can refer back to in the future.

Also go out and find 5 sites that you think should not have come up under these words and do the same thing. Read, copy and paste the meta tag content.

This is something that you should do daily for a minimum of 1 week for the initial input, and weekly if you intend to perform regular maintenance of your SE results.

Choose a Focused Keyword/Phrase Campaign
Now that you have the words/phrases that work for your competitors and don't work for your product or on-line offering, you can begin to compile a viable list that will work to your advantage. Don't bother to include words that will generate extremely broad results like "the green yoga ball", only include "yoga ball" with the understanding that "the" and "green" are applicable to far too many web sites to be wasted in your efforts.

Keep your list short and concise; don't include every descriptive word you can think of. This will only spread your results out over a broader field and will not attract the visitors that you are specifically trying to target.

Make sure all the words you've chosen are actually relevant in the visitor's perspective. Use the terminology they would use to talk to you, not necessarily the terminology you would use to talk to them; they are after all the ones who are doing the searching.

Be sure that the most significant words are included with and without capitalization of the first letter, and make sure not to repeat them too many times. SE's disqualify meta tags that repeat the same words too often, a safe number not to exceed is generally 5 times per word. Also consider including common misspellings.

Choose an Appealing and Strong Meta Description
Your description is as important as your keywords/phrases. The description is what is displayed under your web site title in the search results and it will undoubtedly influence the SE visitor to choose you over another site in the same set of results. Don't be discouraged if the SE ignores your description and displays the first sentence of your web site content instead. This still happens with some SE's, it is a way for them to insure that the visitor running the query is getting a valid result. This in no way invalidates your effort to have a strong description imbedded in your meta tags. The work is worth it when it works, it's unfortunate that all queries don't function by the same rules, but then again that's what makes the Web and the Internet such an interesting place.

Ask for Your Web Professionals Opinion
Ask the person who designed your web site to look over the tags before including them in your content. Their opinion is valid, and they have much more experience with the rules than you do. If they tell you that you are breaking the rules, adjust your tags accordingly. It is much harder to fix or change a listing than it is to get one in most SE's.

Choose a Tracking & Reporting System for Your Site
What is the point of going through all this work when you don't have any real way of knowing what is working for you and what isn't? Maybe your keywords/phrases are turning up phenomenal SE results and gobs of visitors are visiting your site, but you're not getting any e-mails or calls? Having a decent tracking & reporting system will tell you if this is happening or not.

There are many available, choosing one that's right for you is a matter of deciding how much information you really think you need, and how detailed that info should to be.

The top two that we use are Google Analytics and TheCounter.com. The Google system is free and offers a good amount of information that you can choose to filter how you see fit, but it does require a broader understanding of what you are looking at. TheCounter.com system is an inexpensive yearly subscription service that compiles the data in a way that is easy for a novice to understand and won't weigh you down with useless tidbits that won't matter to you.

Why should you take these results seriously? Because maybe the campaign you've chosen isn't the one that is working in today's web market to get you the results you need. Your tracking data will tell you this, and if that's the case, start over.

Networking
Most modern SE's not only qualify your site by the meta tags you've installed or the actual text content it's robot script queried when your site was cataloged, but also by the number of sites you've linked to and who has linked back to you. This is a very important topic in today's Web world. If you stand alone and don't try to incorporate a networking strategy, your cold results will be minimal.

Be Flexible
Understand that the Web is a changing place, constantly in flux. Today's rules don't always apply tomorrow, and what was OK when you first began marketing on-line may be taboo to today's SE logic.