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The best way to avoid being blacklisted by the search engines is to avoid using some questionable techniques that were once popular to gain high rankings. Even if your website is not blacklisted by using some of the techniques below, it may be penalized (buried in the rankings) so your traffic will suffer all the same. When a search engine blacklists a website it will throw your listing off their site and block your site from coming aboard again. This can be done by blocking the domain name, the IP address or both.

Here are a few techniques to avoid, so that your site will not be blacklisted:

Mirror Websites

Mirror websites are sites with identical content but different URL’s. This was once a method used to gain high rankings in the search engines, but since search engines are smarter now, this will only get you penalized or blacklisted.

Doorway (gateway) Pages

Doorway pages are pages with little real content for your visitors that are optimized to rank highly within the search engines. These pages are designed so that visitors will move deeper into the website where the real content lies. Navigation to the doorway pages are usually hidden from the visitors (but not the SE robots) on the homepage.

Invisible Text and Graphics

Using invisible text (text the same or a very similar color to the background) was once used to spam a homepage and some inside pages with non-stop keywords and keyphrases. Also links to doorway pages and hidden site maps can be done with invisible text (or invisible graphics). Some designers will create a graphic link with a 1 pixel by 1 pixel raster image and link this to a hidden inner page such as a hidden site map.

Submitting Pages Too Often

Submitting the same pages to the search engines within a 24 hour period can get you penalized and may delay your website from being listed in the rankings. Some search engines believe that pages submitted sooner than every 30 days is too much. The 30 day rule is a good rule to follow when submitting to multiple search engines.

Using Irrelevant Keywords

Using irrelevant keywords in a website’s metatags and / or body copy in order to achieve high rankings will most certainly backfire. Search engines now want to see parity between these two areas and if your site is thought to be spamming with irrelevant keywords, you site will be penalized or blacklisted.

Automated Submissions to the Major Search Engines

Using an automated service or software to submit your website to the search engines can be extremely counterproductive. Most of the major search engines and directories accept manual submissions but do not like to be spammed with the automated ones.

Cloaking

Cloaking is the practice of deceiving both the search engine and the visitor by serving up different pages for each. The visitor sees a nicely designed and formatted page and the search engine robot scans a page of highly optimized text. Any practice that is deceptive should be avoided and the downfall of cloaking is that, if caught, the website can be banned permanently.

Using a Cheap or Free Web Host

Using a cheap or free web host can hurt in the search engine rankings. Frequent downtime, pages taken down for exceeding the bandwidth deter robots from indexing your site. If a robot cannot access your site often enough, your site will be dropped from the search engines. Hosting is cheap, so if you are serious about your website get your own domain name and host not one like geocities.com/yoursite.

Sharing an IP Address

Sharing an IP Address even from a legitimate web host can get your site in trouble. If you have cleaned up your website from all of the techniques mentioned above and your website still does not get relisted by the search engines in a couple of months, check with your host to see if you are sharing an IP address with other sites. If so, you may consider moving your website to a new host who will give you your own IP address or at least one that is not shared with another company who has had their IP address (an yours) banned by the search engines.

FAST’s Director of Business Development and Marketing, Stephen Baker, has stated that globally there are approximately 30 million crawl-able servers and approximately two-thirds have been banned by the FAST network for spamming. If these numbers are correct, you site may be blacklisted or penalize for “guilt by association.”

http://www.seoresource.net

Kevin Kantola is the CEO of seoresource.net, a search engine optimization company, and has written many articles over the past 20 years.

Many major search engines now have the capability to index PDF files created by Adobe Acrobat and return them in search results. If you are a Web site owner with PDF files on your site, this is good news.

What you may not know is that this capability presents potential usability problems, especially for searchers. What is the big deal? Let’s find out.

Searching for “blessing of a Christmas tree” on Google returns a link to a PDF file in the results. (www.usccb.org/publishing/advent2003/XMASTREE.PDF)

If searchers click on this listing, the link automatically opens a PDF file with no navigation to the main site. Users are trapped! They have no way to explore other pages of the site for more information.

So, what’s going on and, more importantly, how to do we fix it?

Essentially, the PDF format is not the culprit; the real problem is the author’s failure to create the files with Web users in mind. This is not unusual since pdf files are often documents created for other media and not specifically for the web.

PDF authoring software, such as Adobe Acrobat 5.0, offers the ability to include both a navigational structure and hyperlinks on a PDF page. This will allow users who land on this page from a search engine to continue to navigate the site. Whenever possible, use the built-in capability of the software to add navigational elements before publishing the document.

Ideally, the best solution is to create your pages in HTML, rather than PDF format. If the information contained in the pdf files is very popular or highly requested, consider making the effort to convert them to HTML for best results.

Depending on the purpose of the document, a PDF format can be preferable. For example, PDF files offer better functionality for pages that are highly structured and commonly printed, such as application forms and price lists.

To fix the PDF USER TRAP, you will have to republish your files, adding some type of navigation structure and/or link back your main Web site. An easy way to accomplish this is to add a footer to the bottom of each page that includes a link back to the home page. Often the pages published as .pdf files were never intended to receive traffic from the search engines in the first place. If you have .pdf files on your site you do not want to be accessible to the search engines, the best solution is to place all of your PDF files in a single folder and do a robots exclusion (http://www.robotstxt.org/).

Don’t overlook the potential traffic from your .pdf files. Take a few extra steps to help users continue on to your site and you may be surprised and pleased by the results.

Craig Geis is the search engine specialist for the The Karcher Group (http://www.thekarchergroup.com), a full-service web design and marketing company based in Canton, OH.

Search started cheap. Years ago, search engines figured their profit would come from two unique angles, advertising and investments. The advertising front evaporated when it was discovered that Internet users did not click on banner ads as often as was necessary to turn a profit. As for the investment angle, there was a time when search engine firms such as Excite worked to develop the “new-web” in partnership with @Home. Those were the days when high-flying IT companies were valued so highly on the stock market that AOL was able to purchase the Time Warner Corporation. Those days came to an abrupt end on Friday April 14, 2000 when the NASDAQ lost over 1/3 of its value in one day. After the tech bubble burst, IT firms including search engines needed to find new means of revenue generation.

Just over four years later, there are far fewer major search engines and far higher costs to advertise on the remaining players. There is also a lot more money flowing in from the business of search. Some, such as Google and Yahoo executives can only see these developments as a good thing. Others, such as the typical small business owner may not see a great deal of promise in these developments, just radically higher costs. Finding a balance between intelligent online advertising options and intergalactic online advertising costs will be a challenge for small business owners in the coming years. As with most challenging business problems, the best decisions come from effective planning based on solid information. The first piece of information small business planners should know is, all major search engines now universally see themselves as businesses first, information aggregators second. This means costs are going to rise substantially over the next few years, even at Google.

GOOGLE
Google continues to offer free, unpaid listings to anyone with a website. If you have a website, and that website has incoming links, it is almost impossible not to get listed on Google without using meta tags. While getting into Google’s database is as easy as getting another website to link to you, achieving Top20 placement under highly competitive keyword phrases has become far more difficult. According to an article published in today’s Internet Retailer, sites that don’t place in the Top30 results (first three pages) are almost universally ignored by search engine users. Getting into Google’s database is simply not enough to get Google users to visit your website, you need to be found on the first three pages, preferably on the first page of Google results. The question is, how to get there…

It used to be much easier to get a first page placement at Google. Great content, solid optimization, and a few relevant incoming links were all that was necessary to put a website on top of Google. Since the infamous “Florida Update” in November, Google has been working almost entirely on incoming links. Without a strong set of incoming links, even the most well optimized site is not likely going to achieve a strong placement at Google (with the exception of non-competitive keyword targets). This situation has given rise to a new version of an old issue for Google; the commoditization of links from sites with high PageRanks. Most SEO’s who’ve been in this game for more than two years will remember the fiasco when Google degraded listings from the SEO company Search King and sites linked to Search King. The owner of Search King, Bob Massa decided to sell links from his PR8 site and publicly advertised the new service. Massa found dozens of webmasters willing to spend big-bucks on a link from Search King as they felt the link was valuable to improving placements at Google. In theory, they were correct. In practice, Massa found his site and those linking to his site had their PageRank lowered by Google. Widely vilified in the SEO community then, Massa ’s basic idea has been copied by dozens of other businesses, the most notable of which is called Buy/Sell Links.

As Google continues to be the most used search tool in the world and prominent placement on Google can either make or break an online business, the commoditization of links seems a natural, albeit dangerous, outcome. I use the word dangerous because Google’s ranking algorithm is, in my mind, in danger of becoming permanently skewed. I think this practice is also dangerous because it will serve to price a good ranking out of the budget of most small business owners. For example, StepForth charges between $600 and $3500 (on average) for SEO services to small business websites. We also have a link-building service in which we activity find relevant links for our clients’ websites. That service costs $12/link. Most sites that come through require at least 50 incoming links to compete with the current Top10 under their chosen keyword phrases. Suddenly an SEO project that would have cost $600 last year is now being quoted at $1200! That’s double the cost but in some cases, that is what it takes to get the desired placement(s) on Google.

YAHOO!
Yahoo is the second most important search engine, based solely on user numbers. Yahoo spent most of last year acquiring Inktomi, Overture, AltaVista, and AlltheWeb, making it the largest network of major search tools on the Internet. With so many search properties came an equal number of paid-inclusion programs which made little sense to the accountants at Yahoo. In what may be a penny-wise but pound-foolish move, Yahoo introduced a new pricing structure that came into effect late last week. Known as Site Match (for smaller websites), Yahoo’s new paid-inclusion program has a pay-per-click component along with an annual $49(US) review fee. It should be noted that Yahoo also has a free-submit option that webmasters can take advantage of however sites submitted without signing up for SiteMatch or SiteMatch XChange will not be spidered nearly as often as sites that pay the fees. This change prompted me to write a rather detailed notice to our clients which can be viewed here. The bottom line is that, under the SiteMatch program, each click will cost either $0.15 or $0.30 per click on top of the annually recurring $49 review fee. Based on the number of visits one of our clients received from Yahoo in February 2004, we estimate approximately $2400 in new costs! As this client is a small business, we are left wondering if this cost, an extra $200/month will prevent her from eating well or taking a much needed vacation next year. Alternately, the added costs might make her think twice about advertising her website at Yahoo. For owners or webmasters of larger websites, Yahoo offers SiteMatch XChange. Under SiteMatch XChange, webmasters negotiate costs directly with Yahoo’s subsidiary, Overture so we are unable to provide hard-cost figures for this service. (For more information view Yahoo/Overture’s new pricing policies)

Now we’ve established this is going to cost you some more money and we haven’t even touched on Microsoft yet! Fortunately, MSN continues to draw from Yahoo so there are no extra costs to mention there. It will happen sooner than later though since MSN is rumored to be introducing a new search tool sometime between July 2004 and January 2005.

Planning a Search Engine Advertising Budget
While the costs have never been higher than they are now, there are far more options available for search engine advertisers. All search tools are offering paid-advertisements much like Google’s AdWords and Yahoo’s Overture listings which in many cases will present lower long-term costs than the previously free traditional listings do. For example, we know Yahoo will charge 15 - 30 cents per click for “traditional” listings but, what if you can acquire an Overture ad for $0.10 per click? Not only will you save the annual fee of $49, you’ll still be paying less per click than you would via the traditional listings. With over 90% of the search engine user market covered in one way or another, most webmasters and business owners would agree it is essential to be listed well at both Google and Yahoo. There is simply no escaping the power these two firms currently hold over the search engine market place. It is wise, however, to take a second look at other services these firms offer advertisers.

Perhaps the best example is Google’s e-commerce catalogue site, Froogle. Submission to Froogle costs absolutely nothing, however, you may need to involve your IT department to establish an XML feed to constantly send information to Froogle’s database. Assuming that Google retains its current ranking algorithm and Yahoo does not make substantial changes to its new pricing schedule, website owners and marketers will need to factor an additional two to three thousand dollars per year at a minimum in order to continue accessing the largest search tools on the Internet. I would like to note that this is a rather big assumption as Google changes its algorithms fairly frequently and is not shy about making radical changes without notice. Yahoo may also revisit its pricing schedule if it finds a lot of opposition from the webmaster community. At this time, however, there are many webmasters who will feel priced out of the game entirely. For these folks, I strongly suggest the other, smaller search engines such as Lycos, Enhance, Vivisimo and AskJeeves, each of which can deliver a small but vital portion of search engine traffic at much lower costs. StepForth staff strive to keep costs down as much as possible and work towards finding ways to limit the financial exposure of our clients. If you think your business or website is being priced out of the market, give one of our representatives a call and perhaps we’ll be able to find solutions for you.

In the meantime, Yahoo continues to honor paid-inclusion contracts from Inktomi so many webmasters will find their sites continue to thrive at Yahoo. Sites with suddenly diminished Google rankings can go on a crash, do-it-yourself, link-building campaign but should beware the pitfalls of irrelevant links or links coming from link farms. If you require more information about the new fees and costs associated with search engine advertising, please feel free to contact StepForth by phone at 1-877-385-5526 or by Email at info@stepforth.com

Jim Hedger is a senior editor for ISEDB.com. Also he is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing expert working for StepForth Search Engine Placement in Victoria BC. He has worked as an SEO for over 5 years and welcomes the opportunity to share his experience through interviews, articles and speaking engagements. Hedger can be reached at jimhedger@stepforth.com

The search engine marketplace has undergone significant changes over the past 18-months but yesterday’s news from Yahoo! marks a turning point in the industry. Timed to coincide with the New York Search Engine Strategies conference, Yahoo announced a massive increase in paid inclusion fees and distribution of results. While Yahoo! and Overture issued press releases through their public relations firm, Fleishman-Hillard, their affiliates and resellers such as Position-Tech and Trellian issued press releases of their own, creating a confusing and at times messy mountain of uninformative information. Countless calls and articles later, we think we have deciphered meaning within the morass. The bottom line is, search engine advertising is about to become a lot more expensive. How these new expenses will impact the search engine marketplace in the long-run remains to be seen but the impact on websites with lower advertising budgets will be enormous.

Yahoo’s distribution reach is massive. Since it began displaying results from its own search engine in place of Google results, Yahoo controls over 41% of search engine traffic either directly or through one of its six distinct search properties, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Directory, Overture, AlltheWeb, Inktomi and AltaVista. Inclusion at Yahoo is extremely important, and may become more important in the near future if AOL continues to consider Yahoo as an alternative listings provider to Google. Yahoo acquired its search engine empire over the past year through the acquisitions of Overture and Inktomi. While Yahoo’s purchasing streak left it in the position of owning several powerful patents and some of the most innovative technologies, it was also left with six different (and sometimes competing) inclusion programs. It appears Yahoo is trying to consolidate these programs but the method they have chosen is eerily reminiscent of a fatally flawed fee structure LookSmart implemented in November 2002.

Yesterday’s announcement centered around Yahoo’s new Content Acquisition Program (CAP), which will be run by Yahoo’s Overture division. CAP has two basic components, one for smaller websites, known as Site Match, and another, known as Site Match XChange for larger corporate sites. Inclusion in either component will be more expensive and will include a cost-per-click charge of $0.15 or $0.30, depending on the competitiveness of the sector the site is listed under.

Site Match
For small businesses, costs will rise considerably. Under the new fee structure, a smaller website will be required to pay the following fees:
$50 deposit (to cover cost-per-click charges)
$49 for review and indexing of the Index page from a URL
$29 for each of the next 2 - 10 pages
$10 for all subsequent pages from a unique domain

This means a minimum cost of $99 for a minimal submission with the addition of a cost-per-click charge of either $0.15 or $0.30, depending on the competitiveness of the category. The hidden fees attached to per-click charges could quickly run into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month if your website marketing team has done their jobs well. For example one of our clients is a small business who’s site sees approximately 100 visitors per day, a reasonable figure for her sector. Accepting the 41% of web traffic figure, and assuming she was being charged the lower figure of $0.15 per click, her placement would cost her approximately $6.15 per day. Over the course of a 30-day month, that charge increases to $184.50. After 12-months, our client will pay approximately $2214.00 in click-through charges on top of the $49 submission fee and $50.00 deposit. That’s a far cry from the $299 cost of being in the directory, the $39 cost of inclusion at Inktomi (placement at Yahoo until April 15), and the no-fee costs when Yahoo displayed results from Google. The only major benefit to the small advertiser is an increased frequency of visits from Yahoo’s spiders which allows webmasters and SEOs to make minor tweaks and see results much faster.

Site XChange
For larger, corporate websites, the new fee structure is not as daunting or intimidating, and may provide benefits for the advertisers. Site XChange will accept all pages in a site from an XML feed detailing information about that site. Overture staff will manage these accounts and provide feedback to webmasters in order to help them improve the information they provide to help improve rankings under targeted keywords and phrases. Fees will be charged on a pay-per-click basis. Ask your webmaster or SEO for advise on establishing an XML feed, or follow this link for more information.

Costs Per Click
Washington DC based SEO Heidi Hendricks posted a breakdown of costs per category at the IHelpYouServicesForums today. She found the list at this Overture page.
Tier 1 Categories: $.15/click Tier 2 Categories: $.30/click
Adult
Automotive
Books
Computers & Software
Dating
Education & Career
Jewelry & Watches
Music & Video
Office
Other
Reference
Sports & Outdoors
Toys & Baby Equipment
Apparel
Electronics
Financial Services
Flowers, Gifts & Registry
Health, Beauty & Personal Care
Home & Garden
Professional Services
Real Estate
Telecom & Web Services
Travel

The Bottom Lines
The last time the search engine marketing world saw a fee-schedule like this one was in November 2002 when LookSmart introduced a cost-per-click charge on top of previously paid submission fees. Webmasters immediately rebelled against LookSmart and look what’s happened since. That is where the comparison ends however as Yahoo is the second largest search tool in the world and placement at Yahoo is just about as essential as placement at Google. A webmaster rebellion is not likely to last very long or be successful. A better idea would be for everyone to tell Yahoo’s customer service department what they think of this new pricing schedule by following this convenient link. We expect the team at Yahoo to make some changes to the fee structure of Site Match as it is obviously unfair to smaller players and will likely improve Overture’s revenues at the cost of Yahoo’s.

Adding a cost-per-click charge on top of a fee for inclusion might also drive smaller businesses over to Google which continues to provide the only 100% free listings available from the major search engines. This change also abruptly ends the honeymoon the “new” Yahoo has enjoyed with search engine marketers. SEOs and webmasters seemed unanimous in their praise for Yahoo’s recent Google-free listings. With a massive increase in fees, many small businesses will no longer be able to afford to list in Yahoo. Several of our clients view search engine marketing as an equalizer against their larger corporate competition. This assumes all things are equal on the Internet, which is obviously untrue as all advertising budgets are not created equally.

On a darker note, Danny Sullivan has predicted that the days of free-listings are numbered, citing this move from Yahoo as his main example. With Google being the only major player not charging fees for inclusion, it is assumed that it is only a matter of time before they are forced into jumping on the fee-for-service bandwagon. Luckily, Google co-founder Larry Page criticized Yahoo’s new policy yesterday saying he felt paid-inclusion has the ability to compromise the credibility of search.

For now, it appears the future is about to get a lot more expensive. Thank goodness it is at least interesting.

Jim Hedger is a senior editor for ISEDB.com. Also he is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing expert working for StepForth Search Engine Placement in Victoria BC. He has worked as an SEO for over 5 years and welcomes the opportunity to share his experience through interviews, articles and speaking engagements. Hedger can be reached at jimhedger@stepforth.com

As the economy begins to recover in certain parts of the world, more and more online marketers are looking for affordable ways to drive qualified traffic to their sites. That’s why, now more than ever, you need to optimize your site for the search engines.

Have you heard the saying, “Short-term sacrifice for long-term gain”? It applies here. For just a little effort, you can ensure a practically endless supply of visitors to your site for years to come. And the benefits are unbeatable.

Free Exposure

There is absolutely no cost for submitting to most of the major search engines like Google. That means you get exceptional exposure in front of people who are looking for what you have to offer. Anybody can afford fr.ee.

Targeted Traffic

If you develop your site to focus on specific keyphrases that your customers would use when searching, you can drive extremely targeted traffic to your site. Use tools like Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) to find out which phrases are most often used to locate sites like yours.

Easy To Learn

Search engine optimization (despite what many so-called “gurus” will tell you) is relatively easy to learn. Simply hang out in a few search engine optimization (SEO) forums (http://www.highrankings.com/forum and http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/forum are two of the best) and ask questions.

Consistent Delivery of Visitors

People use search engines to find what they are looking for all the time, all day long. In fact, 85% of people online use a search engine when trying to locate a product, service, or information. That means your SEO’d site receives a constant stream of visitors 24/7.

Exposure On Other Sites

Many search engines now offer to provide their search results on other Web sites. If a site that subscribes to Google or MSN’s search result service has a similar theme to your site, you could find your URL popping up all over the ‘Net.

Overall, for the little bit of time it takes to optimize your site, search engine listings simply can’t be ignored. Why continue to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars a month for paid advertising when you can have a horde of visitors delivered to your site fr.ee? Before you spend another dime on paid ads, take a good, hard look at search engine optimization.

Diane Hughes is an accomplished Internet entrepreneur and editor of the popular ProBizTips Newsletter. Subscribe to her newsletter for more tips, tricks, and secrets of the trade — plus get HUNDREDS of eBooks, software, and tools just for subscribing! http://www.ProBizTips.com

Two of the most important factors of any Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign are creating successful ads and deciding how much to pay per click. There are many PPC options out there to choose from, I am going to focus on the two most popular, Google AdWords and Overture.

Creating your ads for AdWords
Creating your ad copy is the single most important part of any ad campaign. You want your ad to stand out amongst the others and scream out ‘click me!’ If your add looks and says the same thing as everyone else users will simply pass it by.

Before creating your ads you need to determine your target market and keyword selections. If your company focuses on a specific market niche try to target your ads in regards to that niche. Properly targeted ads will almost always out-perform those directed at a general audience.

When creating your first ad be sure to fit in your main keywords either in the title or near the beginning of the body text. Say something to draw attention by using call to action phrases and words that provoke enthusiasm and response. Things like “ Save on DVDs,” “Get cheap stereos,” or “Join now for 20% discount,” etc. Just be cautious, if you advertise something that you don’t offer, Google will pull your ad. If your ad says you have something for free, you better have something for free listed on your landing page! Always be sure to follow Google’s Guidelines .

Once you are happy with your first ad, create 3 more ads that are radically different from the first. After 3 or 4 days take a look at how your ads are doing. (If you are using less frequently searched terms you may have to wait 1-2 weeks for better results.) Check the click through rate (CTR) of each ad. In most cases one of the 4 will show to be out-performing the rest. If this is the case, delete the poorly performing ads and create 3 new ads that closely resemble the successful one, each with subtle differences in the title and body text.

Again wait 3 or 4 days to see which of the ads is out performing the rest. If you again notice that one stands out, repeat the process. Eventually you will end up with 4 quality ads that are performing equally. Once the ads have levelled out, continue to keep an eye on them, I recommend daily. If one begins to slip, slightly tweak the wording. You must always keep an eye on your ads if you wish for them to continually perform well.

Determining your Max Cost Per Click with AdWords
With AdWords when you enter your MAX CPC, it will then show you what Google estimates your average position will be for each keyword. ( The position predictions provided by Google are based on historical data from previous advertisers and are not 100% accurate, but it will give you an idea what to expect.)

Unfortunately there is no way to see what the competition is paying, so in most cases it’s a bit of a duck hunt in the beginning. I suggest starting out with a MAX CPC slightly higher than you would normally, this will give you a slightly higher ranking and increase your chances of accumulating clicks. If your ad performs really well your rank will increase. As you begin to establish a good click through rate (CTR) you can adjust your max CPC to reflect the position you wish to obtain. (See part one of this article to find out how Google ranks ads.)

Creating your ads for Overture
With Overture, writing the perfect ad is slightly different than with AdWords. Overture only allows you to create one ad per keyword, so this takes away the option of trying out various ads and going with the obvious winner, however, the basis for creating your initial ad remains virtually the same. After you have selected your target market and main keywords, write a specific ad targeting each individual keyword and be sure to include the keyword in the title or beginning of the main body text along with a call to action phrase or something that is sure to draw attention. Remember to check the status of your ads on a weekly basis, and tweak as needed. Keep and eye on your click through rate and regularly tweak poorly performing ads

Determining your Max Cost Per Click with Overture
Deciding how much to spend on Overture is simple. Take a look at what the competition is spending, and out bid them. With Overture you should always try to be in the top 3 if you wish to have your ad dispersed among partner sites. (Yahoo, Lycos, MSN, etc). If the number 1 spot is currently paying 25 cents per click you need only bid 26 cents to grab the number 1 spot. If you want the number one spot, but are also willing to pay more, you can bid 40 cents, and will only be charged the 26 cents. One penny above the competition. Keep in mind though, if someone else increases their bid, your actual cost will also increase up to the max CPC you have entered.

Managing an AdWords or Overture PPC campaign can be confusing at first, but it doesn’t take long to get a handle on what works. Creating a highly successful ad the first time around with either AdWords or Overture is a rare occurrence, but with a bit of regular maintenance and a well targeted campaign it won’t take long to start seeing results.

Article by Scott Van Achte, StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc

The search engine environment continues to evolve rapidly, easily outpacing the ability of consumers and SEO practitioners to quickly adapt to the new landscape. With the ascension of Inktomi to the level of importance that until recently was held solely by Google, SEO practitioners need to rethink several strategies, tactics and, perhaps even the ethics of technique. Assuming this debate will unfold over the coming months, how does an “ethical SEO firm” work to optimize websites for two remarkably unique search engines without falling back on old-fashioned spammy tactics of leader-pages or portal-sites? Recently, another SEO unrelated to StepForth told me that he was starting to re-optimize his websites to meet what he thought were Inktomi’s standards as a way of beating his competition to what looks to be the new main driver. That shouldn’t be necessary if you are careful and follow all the “best practices” developed over the years.

The answer to our puzzle is less than obvious but it lies in the typical behaviors of the two search tools. While there are a number of similarities between the two engines, most notably in behaviors of their spiders, there are also significant differences in the way each engine treats websites. For the most part, Google and Inktomi place the greatest weight on radically different site elements when determining eventual site placement. For Google, strong and relevant link-popularity is still one of the most important factors in achieving strong placements. For Inktomi, titles, meta tags and text are the most important factors in getting good rankings. Both engines consider the number and arrangement of keywords, incoming links, and the anchor text used in links (though Google puts far more weight on anchor text than Inktomi tends to). That seems to be where the similarities end and, the point where SEO tactics need revision. Once Inktomi is adopted as Yahoo’s main listing provider, both Google and Inktomi will drive relativity similar levels of search engine traffic. Each will be as important as the other with the caveat that Inktomi powers two of the big three while Google will only power itself.

2004 - The Year of the Spider-Monkey
The first important factor to think about is how does each spider work?

Entry to Inktomi Does Not Mean Full-Indexing
Getting your site spidered by Inktomi’s bot “Slurp” is essential. Like “Google-bot”, “Slurp” will follow every link it comes across, reading and recording all information. A major difference between Google and Inktomi is that, when Google spiders a new site, there is a good chance of getting placements for an internal page without paying for that specific page to appear in the index. As far as we can tell, that inexpensive rule of thumb does not apply to Inktomi. While it is entirely possible to get entire sites indexed by Inktomi, we have yet to determine if Inktomi will allow all pages within a site to achieve placements without paying for these sites to appear in the search engine returns pages, (SERPs). Remember, Inktomi is a paid-inclusion service which charges webmasters an admission fee based on the number of pages in a site they wish to have spidered. From the information we have gathered, Slurp will follow each link in a site and, if provided a clear path, will spider every page in the site but, pages within that site that are paid-for during the submission will be spidered far more frequently and will appear in the indexes months before non-paid pages. We noted this when examining how many pages Inktomi lists from newer clients versus how many from old clients. We have noticed the older the site, the more pages appear in Inktomi’s database and on SERPs on search engines using the Inktomi database. (This is assuming the webmaster only paid for inclusion of their INDEX page) Based on Inktomi’s pricing, an average sized site of 50 pages could cost up to $1289 per year to have each page added to the paid-inclusion database so it is safer then not to assume that most small-business webmasters won’t want to pay that much.

Google’s Gonna Get You
Google-bot is like the Borg in Star Trek. If you exist on the web and have a link coming to your site from another site in Google’s index, Google-bot will find you and assimilate all your information. As the best known and most prolific spider on the web, Google-bot and its cousin Fresh-bot visit sites extremely frequently. This means that most websites with effective links will get into Google’s database without needing to manually submit the site. As Google currently does not have a paid-inclusion model, every page in a site can be expected to appear somewhere on Google produced SERPs. By providing a way of finding each page in the site (effective internal links), website designers should see their sites appearing in Google’s database within two months of publishing.

We Now Serve Two Masters; Google and Inktomi
OK, that said, how to optimize for both without risking placements at one over the other. The basic answer is to give each of them what they want. For almost a year, much of the SEO industry focused on linking strategies in order to please Google’s PageRank. Such heavy reliance on linking is likely one of the reasons Google re-ordered its algorithm in November. Relevant incoming links are still be extremely important but can no longer be considered the “clincher” strategy for our clients. Getting back to the basics of site optimization and remembering the lessons learned over the past 12-months should produce Top10 placements. SEOs and webmasters should spend a lot of time thinking about titles, tags and text as well as thinking about linking strategies (both internal and external). Keyword arrangement and densities are back on the table and need to be examined by SEOs and their clients as the new backbone of effective site optimization. While the addition of a text-based sitemap has always been considered an SEO Best Practice, it should now be considered an essential practice. The same goes for unique titles and tags on each page of a site. Another essential practice SEOs will have to start harping on is to only work with sites that have unique, original content. I am willing to bet that within 12-months, Inktomi introduces a rule against duplicate content as a means of controlling both the SEO industry and the affiliate marketing industry. Sites with duplicate content are either mirrors, portals or affiliates, none of which should be necessary for the hard-working SEO. While there are exceptional circumstances where duplicate content is needed, more often than not dupe-content is a waste of bandwidth and will impede a SEO campaign more than it would help.

The last tip for this article is, don’t be afraid to pass higher costs on to the clients because if your client wants those placements soon, paid-inclusion of internal pages will be expected. When one really examines the costs of paid inclusion it is not terribly different than other advertising costs, with one major exception. Most paid-advertising is regionally based (or is prohibitively expensive for smaller businesses). Search engine advertising is, by nature, international exposure and that is worth paying for.

Jim Hedger is a senior editor for ISEDB.com. Also he is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing expert working for StepForth Search Engine Placement in Victoria BC. He has worked as an SEO for over 5 years and welcomes the opportunity to share his experience through interviews, articles and speaking engagements. Hedger can be reached at jimhedger@stepforth.com