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Internet Marketing in the Age of Accretion

Why not to register with 3,500 search engines

Content

The number one thing you can do to get people in to buy your stuff is put up useful stuff. Search engines love page content. Real page content. Some search engines ignore "invisible" text and very small text - but good old human-readable text they all love!

Meta Tags

Meta tags in general don't do anything. They have been removed from the search criteria of every major search engine except Inktomi, and they don't even run a full web engine anymore.

Meta tags were useful. Back in 1996 when search engines didn't have the power they have now, engines would index the very important parts of the page only including an abstract and keywords found at the top. For example, if you had a 300k thesis talking about water quality, the important parts of your paper might be way at the bottom, and the search engine wouldn't see them... so you would put them at the top to help people find you better.

Two days later, Evil Marketers figured that if they put in very popular search terms (e.g. sex, cars, rock and roll) they would get tons of people! And tons of disinterested and confused people were hearded to their sites.

Two days later, Noble Engineers at the search engine places said "Our product is no longer doing what it is supposed to do - people are disinterested and confused, since we have more powerful systems now - we'll just index the entire page content and remove the Meta stuff from our criteria."

Meta tags will do you no harm. They will also do you no good. People who say otherwise are working with outdated information. Feel free to research each engine yourself.

Indexes

For the love of Pete, get listed in these! There are only two: Google and Yahoo. Much of your traffic will come from these. This is the number one thing you should do after your site is up. (remember the number one thing to do while putting your site up is provide good content)

Search Engines

80% off all searches are done on 4 search engines. 95% are done on 18 search engines. Target these. Once you start getting people from these areas and everything is working well... if you really want to experience diminishing returns... you can squeeze the remaining 3,482 search engines for the other 5% of the traffic.

The big ones: Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL.
The best of the rest: AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Excite, Lycos (HotBot,) Northern Light.

Real Marketing

Now that you've done your internet marketing (pretty easy wasn't it?) you need to start your real marketing!

Put your web address on everything you own. If you have business cards, note pads, envelopes, brochures, a storefront, a car - put it on. It is cheap and useful. If the context is not clear, explain it a bit. (i.e. If your name is "MooSolutions.com" when you put that on your car, add a line like "Multimedia Development" so people know why they should visit you!)

Now you start needing money.

No one starting out is going to be competing with Wal-Mart. Most successful online stores offer a very specific kind of product (as opposed to the Wal-Mart anything-we-can-fit-in-the-store model.)

Target people who are interested in your product.

The easiest way I can think of is trade publications. You'll get a lot more action out of a quarter page ad in "Quilting Monthly" than you would with a local TV campaign targeting quilters.

The other way is targeted banner ads. Most search engines support these. For example, if you purchase ads on results pages from Google where people are searching for "Automotive Supplies" you already know those people are going to be interested in your product.

Interested people click on banner ads.

Google has well placed contextual and surprisingly text-only ads! In an age where marketers tell you you need color and flashing things, in truth you need useful content. Useful outperforms flashy 5 to 1. No joke, and I'm not making up the statistic (I found it using Google :-)

This article was written on June 26, 2001.
It will be at least partially out of date by January 2002.


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