Watch Your Web Traffic Explode: Market To
The Top 6 Search Engines
Author: Shirley Kelly
Want to gain instant web traffic without
having to spend months trying to figure out
how to do it? Read this article and discover
how to cut to the chase when it comes to what
search engines you should target your
marketing efforts towards.
The Key Players
There are countless search engines driving
traffic to business websites. Most are small,
targeted and growing, while others have large,
broad and loyal audiences. Just six search
engines control the majority of queries on the
Internet including Yahoo, Google, Ask Jeeves
and AllTheWeb. Other search sites compile the
results from multiple engines into all
encompassing SERPs, such as Dogpile. The Open
Directory Project or DMOZ, is a non-commercial
directory focused on human-editing and free
inclusion.
Traffic Facts
The following shows the average reach. For
instance, if you sampled a million Internet
users, average reach states how many visit
each of the follow (Metrics as of February
2005.)
Yahoo 301,800 reach per million Internet users
Google 170,650 reach per million Internet
users
Ask Jeeves 6,905 reach per million Internet
users
AllTheWeb 1,070 reach per million Internet
users
Dogpile 1,485 reach per million Internet users
DMOZ 1,880 reach per million Internet users
Yahoo
Touted the life engine in their latest ad
campaign, Yahoo actually began as a simple
project by two men, David Filo and Jerry Yang,
in January 1995. During their studies at
Stanford University, Yahoo was their way to
catalog and organize Internet bookmarks. Soon
the project grew, as the Internet grew,
gathering interest from visitors who added
Yahoo to their own bookmarks and revisited
often to find new additions. Today Yahoo is
the top ranked, highly trafficked website on
the Internet. Word of mouth grew into what is
now a publicly traded company. Yahoo listing
is as important as that in the phone book.
Before submitting to human-edited directories,
prepare a business description no more than 25
words in length using two to three key terms
that may be used to find the website. This
description should exclude marketing language
and superlatives.
Google
Google, named for the term which represents
the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, was
founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two men
who met at Stanford University graduate school
studying computer science in 1995. Together
they collaborated on a search engine called
BackRub. After much investment seeking and
technological experimentation, Google.com open
in a garage in September 1998 in Menlo Park,
California. Google handled more than 100
million search queries a day by the end of
2000. In February 2002, Google launched Ad
Words, a self-serve cost per click advertising
model. In December 2002, Google launched
Froogle, a free product search service. 2004
brings Local Search and Gmail, as well as a
public offering under the ticker GOOG. No
longer a garage business, Google reaches an
average of 148,800 million users each day.
Being included in the next Googlebot Internet
crawls is as important as drinking milk.
Ask Jeeves
Ask Jeeves Inc. was founded in 1996 and is now
a publicly traded company with headquarters in
California. Its syndicates search technology
and advertising units to a affiliate partner
network including Excite, Ask.com, Teoma, Ask
Jeeves Kids, MyWebSearch, MySearch, MyWay,
MaxOnline, iwon.
A butler inspired by the books by English
writer P.G. Wodehouse characterizes the Ask
Jeeves brand. The website began as a question
and answer service - the users ask a questions
and an answer is generated. With an editorial
staff building each question and answer
scenario, the answers often didnt add up to
the searchers actual intent. After the dot com
crash, stock dropped to under $1, yet today
performs in the $30 range due to heavy
restructuring, cuts and a quality search
focus. Ask Jeeves began as a human-edited
listing but has since abandoned this for
algorithmic search results. Smart Search
allows users to search keywords such as
celebrity names and receive an instant
biography and photograph above results.
Binocular icons next to certain results allow
quick web page previews. Submission to Ask
Jeeves is managed by ineedhits.com. Submission
includes 12-months on the ask.com and Teomas
U.S. index including Excite, MyWay.com,
Hotbot.com, iLor, lxquick, Search123.com,
Metacrawler, MySearch.com and Mamma.com. Each
listing includes weekly page refreshes, 7-day
inclusion and detailed click-through
reporting. Pricing starts at $30 per URL and
$18 for each addition.
AllTheWeb
A Overture Services business, AlltheWebs index
(provided by Yahoo) includes billions of web
pages, as well as tens of millions of PDF and
MS Word files. AlltheWeb offers specialized
search tools for the major browsers and
advanced search features, supporting searches
in 36 different languages, news, images,
audio, video and multimedia files. AlltheWeb
is powered by FAST and considered by some as a
likely candidate to exceed Googles success.
The search engines strongest asset is fresh
information, re-indexing sites and removing
broken links every 7-11 days. AllTheWeb is
also know for its SafeSearch filtering option
that removes offensive content from SERPs.
Dogpile
With one single click, Dogpile fetches the
best results from the combined pool of the
best search engines - instead of results from
just one single search engine. And Dogpile
makes it easy to refine your search so you can
find the most meaningful results right away.
No wonder its the Top Dog of the search
industry. Dogpile was developed in 1996 using
innovative metasearch technology to find
results in many leading search engines
including Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, About,
FindWhat, LookSmart and more. All results are
combined into one comprehensive SERP. Dogpile
is currently owned and operated by InfoSpace,
Inc. They brand the business on Arfie, their
signature dog logo. Dogpile, like other search
engines, allows data (or keyword), image,
audio, multimedia, news and shopping searches.
Though a met search engine pulling information
from all other major search sources, website
owners may also submit to the DogPile database
directly. This listing includes DogPile,
Verizon, WebCrawler, NBC and MetaCrawler.
Open Directory Project (DMOZ)
The Open Directory Project is the largest,
most comprehensive human-edited directory of
the web. It is constructed and maintained by a
vast, global community of volunteer editors.
The Open Directory Project is an Internet
resource hierarchically arranged by subject -
from broad to specific. The ODP is maintained
by editors that evaluate websites for
inclusion in the directory. All submissions
are subject to editor evaluation. ODP does not
consider itself a search engine and, in that
light, is highly selective. Not all sites are
accepted. The goal is to make all information
provided by the database as useful as
possible, not to simply include all sites on
the Internet or serve as a promotional tool
for businesses. To assist editorial
discretion, ODP has policies for submitting
sites for consideration. They may reject,
delete or edit submissions that violate their
policies or that they do not want included.
The ODP also rejects, deletes or blocks sites
possibly associated with a user violating
their policies.
Needless to say there are far more aspects to
marketing to the top 5 search engines than I
can cover in this article but the information
provided here should give you a good insight
into understanding how important it is to
submit your web site for inclusion in these
search engines.
About the Author:
Shirley Kelly is a full time internet marketer
who has written over 200 articles in print and
5 published ebooks. To read her latest ebook
The Newbies Guide To Internet Marketing visit
her online at http://www.websitemarketing2.com
