The traffic a website will receive from the SE's can be significant, can be a steady flow week after week, but after 18-24 months, no matter what, every website reaches the limit of v's it will receive from the SE's and it is not possible to increase that number. All one can do is to maintain it.

The discovery of this fact (1997) caused a general amazement. Somehow, people were thinking that the SE's would provide all the v's they would need to run a business onlihe. Many companies who should have know a lot better turned up their noses at the SE's and abandoned their efforts in this area.

It sounds so strange now that such an obvious fact as "You cannot base your entire online marketing effort on the SE's" was received 3 and 4 years ago (and some companies are still reacting the same way) as "Gosh, if we can't make SE's our Entire Online Marketing Effort, then we shouldn't work them at all."

Now, most companies focus on another fact, "the SE's Always deliver targeted visitors to your website at a lower cost/v than any other method." Now that established business metrics are being applied to websites, a method that delivers the lowest cost/v merits serious attention.

Most companies outsource this effort to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies, also known as Search Engine Placement (SEP) companies at rates from $500 - $100,000/year.

The wild variation in fees depends partly on the chutzpah of the SEP company and partly on the level of competition a website faces for their keywords. If your website needs to rank highly under terms like 'travel' or 'gambling' or 'jobs', the competition is so fierce that an SEP company that can obtain top rankings for those terms can charge high fees because the return from top rankings for those sorts of terms is measured in millions of v's/day. Even at $100,000/year, the cost/v could be under a penny.

If your keywords are less competitive (e.g., 'radioisotope thermoelectric generators' or 'manual typewriters', you would be able to pay a much lower fee and the return would also be much less.

They are called Pay-per-click SE's because you only pay if a person clicks on your link in the SE and goes to your website. If you bid higher than any other website for a keyword such as 'assisted living' you will show up as #1 when someone searches 'assisted living'. If your bid is the 5th highest for 'assisted living' you will show up 5th for that term, etc. When someone clicks through to your site, GoTo.com charges you the amount you have bid.

Whether that visitor signs a long-term contract at your site and tells 10 friends about you or whether that visitor turns around and leaves your site in two seconds, you pay your bid amount to the PPC. There's the rub.

If 100 v's come to your site via a PPC and you bid $.50 for them, you are billed $50, but if all 100 v's turn around and leave immediately, you just paid $50 essentially for nothing. If those 100 v's produce three long-term contracts you have just made one of the best deals in history. For $50 you have sold thousands of dollars of product/service.

Be wary of all of these PPC's except GoTo.com (some of them are on extremely shaky financial footing and they are not 100% trustworthy) and even with GoTo.com, be aware of your expenses, don't just let it ride without periodically comparing what you are paying with what you are getting.

Due to the popularity of the PPC's, service companies (ClickPatrol.com et al.) exist to manage your PPC accounts. Every website should at least examine the potential for low-cost targeted visitors at the PPC's.

There is no question that the PPC's are here to stay and they should play a role in every site's efforts to 'Increase Visitors to Your Website'. This effort should be outsourced because no one is going to get it right on the first try and the learning experience could be expensive.

There are tools on the GoTo.com site that help you find less-competitive keywords.

Clickthrough rates for banner ads spiraled downward year after year until 2001 is averaging below .5% (5 of every 1000 persons who saw the ad clicked on it to go to the sponsor's website) If you are paying $25 CPM ($25 for every 1000 persons who saw the ad), you have just paid $5.00/v. Only fanatical devotion to the value of 'Name Recognition' can sustain enthusiam for a banner ad campaign that delivers visitors at $5.00 each.

To combat unacceptable clickthrough rates, the sellers of banner ads have gone to popups, popunders, popafters, and other more intrusive forms (the interstitial, superstitial, and the skyscraper). These novelties spike clickthrough rates for a few weeks and then they fall back to less than 1%. The banner ad is dead in the water, both for advertisers and for websites based on revenue from selling banner ad inventory.

--google.com's text advertising Google is now the second-most important SE, after Yahoo and it is conceivable that by 2002, google.com will be the #1 SE. At any rate, it is very important w/ millions of users every day.

Google, at the beginning of 2001, launched two forms of text advertising, which are producing clickthrough rates 5-10 times greater than banner advertising. Of these two forms, the 'Google AdWords' is proving cost-effective and productive for many companies.

However, as more companies begin to use the Google AdWords, they will lose some of their effectiveness. So this is an avenue that should be explored asap in the effort to 'Increase Visitors to Your Website'.

If you search 'assisted living' on google.com you will see examples of both types of text advertising. Google's Premium Sponsorship (essentially a text-type banner ad) displays above all the other matches for a query.

The Premium Sponsorship for the term, 'assisted living' is taken by www.springstreet.com/seniors. The price paid for these premium sponsorships is somewhat negotiable and I don't even know the card rate but the site states: "Google's campaign minimum is $10,000 over three months."

The AdWords for the term, 'assisted living' are taken by #1 www.newlifestyles.com and #2 www.assistmatch.com. Google allows up to 8 AdWord boxes per term, but as each new AdWord is added there is a diminishing return for each advertiser and on many monitors only the first 2 or 3 AdWord boxes show up above the fold.

If you search 'senior living' on google.com you will see that www.springstreet.com/seniors has taken the Premium Sponsorship, but no one has taken any AdWords boxes for this term. That presents an excellent opportunity because when there is only one AdWord box sitting there surrounded by all that white space, the eye is drawn to it. This is an opportunity.

Google charges $15 CPM ($15 per 1000 times that the keyword is searched). Google provides easy-to-read statistics that show the clickthrough rate for each of your AdWords boxes as well as the amount spent and Google allows you to put a cap on your spending. You can select $30 or $50 or whatever and when that amount is spent, the AdWord box disappears and you are not billed any further.

If you can get a 3% clickthrough rate, you will get 30 visitors for $15 ($.50/v). Clickthrough Rates of 5% are not uncommon, so that would bring it down to $.30/v. This form of advertising is semi-risky if a company does not know its return/visitor. Probably, the Google AdWords would work out. There is a belief that the websites that advertise w/ Google AdWords get an extra boost in their regular Google rankings, which, if true, could mean a lot of extra traffic.

--looksmart.com's looklistings LookSmart has arrangements with many other SE's and portals so their search listings show up all over the web. They offer their 'looklistings' which are presented as "Featured Listings" that display above all other matches for a query. Searches for both 'assisted living' and 'retirement communities' dont show any serious takers for these looklistings so an ad for Amazon shows up by default.

These ads are pay-per-click. The exact cost/click is somewhat negotiable, but the minimum committment is $2500/month.

--sponsored links, featured links Factually, every SE (except Yahoo, who stays wedded to the banner ad) has some form of Featured Links or Sponsored Links, where you can insure that a link to your website will show up prominently for your designated keywords. The form of payment, the monthly minimums, the style of display, etc., vary, but the fact is that unless you are fairly confident of your return/visitor, you should steer clear of these forms of advertising.

--affiliate programs Another form of online advertising is to participate in an affiliate program. These can be incredibly complex, but the basic strategy is that you agree to pay Site A and Site B (and it could run to thousands of sites) some amount for each visitor they deliver to your site from their site. There are many forms of this, but the action is the same, Site A has a link to your site and each time someone clicks on that link and comes to your site, you are paying $.10 or $.15 or $.25 or whatever.

$/v = return per visitor Total sales divided by total visitors ($5000 sales divided by 10,000 visitors = $.50/v, which is an acceptable $/v.

Acquisition cost Usually understood as the cost to make a sale. This is the metric used in discussions of the business of running a Website. Acquisition cost is a more complex calculation than cost per visitor [see cost/v] and it is less useful than cost/v because cost/v is unequivocal, easily understood and acted upon. In fact, cost/v is the direct controlling factor in all decisions re: Website advertising and promotion. A certain method may deliver you 100,000 v/day

Click through, clickthru The process of clicking on a link in a search engine output page to visit an indexed site. This is an important link in the process of receiving visitors to a site via search engines. Good ranking may be useless if visitors do not click on the link which leads to the indexed site. The secret here is to provide a good descriptive title and an accurate and interesting description.

Cloaking The hiding of page content. Normally carried out to stop page thieves stealing optimized pages.

Cost/v = cost per visitor A v from a SE has a low cost/v (maybe as low as $.05/v) b/c the cost is only a fraction of what you pay to the SEO company /year + the fees you pay to the SE's/yr divided by the total #v you receive from the SE/yr.

Crawler See Spider.

De-listing The removal of pages from a search engine's index. Removal can occur for various reasons, including unreliability of the machine that hosts a site or because of perceived attempts at spamdexing.

Description Descriptive text associated with a web page and displayed, usually with the page title and URL, when the page appears in a list of pages generated by a search engine or directory as a result of a query. Some search engines take this description from the DESCRIPTION Meta tag - others generate their own from the text in the page. Directories often use text provided at registration.

Dir's = Directories. A server or a collection of servers dedicated to indexing internet web pages and returning lists of pages which match particular queries. Directories (also known as Indexes) are normally compiled manually, by user submission (such as at whatsnew.com), and often involve an editorial selection and/or categorization process (such as at LookSmart and Yahoo).

Doorway Page See Gateway Page.

Dynamic content Information on web pages which changes or is changed automatically, e.g. based on database content or user information. Sometimes it's possible to spot that this technique is being used, e.g. if the URL ends with .asp, .cfm, .cgi or .shtml. It is possible to serve dynamic content using standard (normally static) .htm or .html type pages, though. Search engines will currently index dynamic content in a similar fashion to static content, although they will not usually index URLs which contain the ? character.

FFA = Free For All SE's. The 5000 so-called SE's that are usually nothing more than collection points for your name and email address so they can spam you and sell yr info to other spammers.

Frames An HTML technique for combining two or more separate HTML documents within a single web browser screen. Compound interacting documents can be created to make a more effective web page presented in multiple windows or sub-windows. A framed web site often causes great problems for search engines, and may not be indexed correctly. Search engines will often index only the part of a framed site within the NOFRAMES section, so make sure that the NOFRAMES section includes relevant text which can be indexed by the spiders. If your site uses frames, consider providing a gateway page or adding navigational links within the framed pages. Submit the main page - the one containing the FRAMESET tag to the search engines. If you use a gateway page, submit this separately.

Gateway Page A web page submitted to a search engine to give the relevance-algorithm of that particular spider the data it needs, in the format that it needs it, in order to place a site at the proper level of relevance for the topic(s) in question. (This determination of topical relevance is called "placement".)

A gateway page may present information to the spider, but obscure it from a casual human viewer. The gateway page exists so as to allow a web-site to present one face to the spider, and another to human viewers. There are several reasons why one might want to do this. One, is that the author may not want to publicly disclose placement tactics. Another is that the format that may be easiest for a given spider to understand, may not be the format that the author wishes to present to his viewers for aesthetics. Still another may be that the format that is best for one spider may differ from that which is best for another. By using gateway pages, you can present your site to each spider in the way which is known or thought to be best for that particular spider. Also known as bridge pages, doorway page, entry pages, portals or portal pages.

GoTo.com The leading PPC (pay-per-click) SE. You can bid on yr keywords and agree to pay whatever you bid each time a user clicks to yr site from GoTo.com or from any of the other Se's that use GoTo's top listings.

Hallway page As the SE spiders' ability to index all the pages on the Web due to overload, they began to get sporadic in indexing pages w/in each site. It used to be that the spiders would take their time and index 50 or more pages from a site and now if they index 4 or 5 you are doing well. So, a hallway page is a main page that has links (visible or not visible to the user) to all the pages on the site that you want indexed. There is a better chance the spider will follow those direct links off the home page and that improves your chances of getting more pages into the SE's.

Hidden Text Text on a web page which is visible to search engine spiders but not visible to human visitors. This is sometimes because the text has been set the same colour as the background, because multiple TITLE tags have been used or because the text is an HTML comment. Hidden text is often used for spamdexing. Many search engines can now detect the use of hidden text, and often remove offending pages from their database or lower such pages' positioning.

Hit In the context of visitors to web pages, a hit (or site hit) is a single access request made to the server for either a text file or a graphic. If, for example, a web page contains ten buttons constructed from separate images, a single visit from someone using a web browser with graphics switched on (a "page view") will involve eleven hits on the server. (Often the accesses will not get as far as your server because the page will have been cached by a local internet service provider).

Inbound Link A hypertext link to a particular page from elsewhere, bringing traffic to that page. Inbound links are counted to produce a measure of the page popularity. Searches for the inbound links to a page can be made on Altavista, Infoseek and Hotbot.

IP Delivery Similar to agent name delivery, this technique presents different content depending on the IP address of the client. It is very difficult to view pages hidden using this technique, because the real page is only visible if your IP address is the same as (for example) a search engine's spider.

Keyword A word which forms (part of) a search engine query.

Keyword Density A property of the text in a web page which indicates how close together the keywords appear. Some search engines use this property for Positioning. Analysers are available which allow comparisons between pages. Pages can then be produced with the similar keyword densities to those found in high ranking pages.

Keyword Domain Name The use of keywords as part of the URL to a website. Positioning is improved on some search engines when keywords are reinforced in the URL.

Keyword Phrase A phrase which forms (part of) a search engine query.

Keyword Purchasing The buying of search keywords from search engines, usually to control banner ad placement. All the major search engines (except EuroSeek and GoTo) insist that keyword purchasing is only used for banner ad. placement, and doesn't influence search results. The display of banner ads. for bought keywords can be studied using a service called Bannerstake from Thomson and Thomson at http://www.namestake.com. which returns the banner ads. displayed when particular queries are used.

Keyword Stuffing The repeating of keywords and keyword phrases in META tags or elsewhere.

Link Popularity A complicated aspect of page ranking now, that involves some decision by the SE's how to weight the sites that link to your site. If Microsoft and Intel and the US Dept of Commerce all link to your site, the SE will probably conclude that your site must be important and give it a boost in the rankings. Conversely, if no other sites link to your site, the Se could decide to give you a rankings bust because your site must be unimportant. Many SEO schemes have been hatched to manipulate link popularity, but none have attained notariety for its success.

Log File A file maintained on a server in which details of all file accesses are stored. Analysing log files can be a powerful way to find out about a web site's visitors, where they come from and which queries are used to access a site.

Log File Analysis Software Various software packages are available to analyse log files. WebTrends is the market leader. Not that WebTrends is much good, but as a marketing company, they are fantastic. Sane Solutions' NetTracker is a serious tool, but prohibitively expensive for small businesses. Wusage from http://www.boutell.com is economical and (once configured) can deliver everything a site owner or manager needs to know about the traffic on their site.

Meta Search Engine A server which passes queries on to many search engines and/or directories and then summarises all the results. Ask Jeeves, Dogpile, Infind, Metacrawler, Metafind and Metasearch are examples of meta search engines.

Meta tag A construct placed in the HTML header of a web page, providing information which is not visible to browsers. The most common meta tags (and those most relevant to search engines) are KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION.

The KEYWORDS tag allows the author to emphasise the importance of certain words and phrases used within the page. Some search engines will respond to this information - others will ignore it. Don't use quotes around the keywords or keyphrases. The DESCRIPTION tag allows the author to control the text of the summary displayed when the page appears in the results of a search. Again, some search engines will ignore this information.

The HTTP-EQUIV meta tag is used to issue HTTP commands, and is frequently used with the REFRESH tag to refresh page content after a given number of seconds. Gateway pages sometimes use this technique to force browsers to a different page or site. Most search engines are wise to this, and will index the final page and/or reduce the ranking or penalize your site, or even ban it.

Mirror Sites Multiple copies of web sites or web pages, often on different servers. The process of registering these multiple copies with search engines is often treated as spamdexing, because it artificially increases the relevancy of the pages. Filters such as the Infoseek Sniffer now remove multiple mirrors from the indexes.

Misspellings People quite often spell words incorrectly when using search engines. Pages which use common misspellings will quite often receive extra hits, so it is a useful technique to include common misspellings of words in alt tags, keywords, page names and titles. A similar effect occurs when spaces are missed out and words are accidentally joined together.

Multiple Domain Names The use of several extra domains to provide gateway pages or gateway sites to the main site. This tactic works a lot better on paper than in practice.

Multiple Keyword Tags The use of more than one Keywords META tag in order to try to increase the relevancy of the best keywords on a page. This is not recommended. It may be detected as a spamming technique, or all but one of the tags may simply be ignored.

Multiple Titles It used to be possible to repeat the HTML title tag in the header section of a page several times to improve search engine positioning. Most search engines now detect this trick.

NoFrames Tag This tag is very important now in SEO. It is a tag which resides inside the Frameset tag of a frameset page. It can contain any amt of content which is read and can be indexed by the SE spiders, but is not visible to human users, b/c the browsers do not display the information. NoFrames was originally a safeguard for framed sites when viewed by browsers that were not able to view framed pages so that some content would be available to the user.

Page View Used in site statistics as a measure of pages viewed rather than server hits. Many server hits may be made to access a single page, causing many separate log file entries. Analysis software can determine that these server hits were generated when a visitor viewed a single page, and group them together to provide this more useful method of counting visitors. See also Hit and Unique Visitor.

pay-per-click A model where you indicate that you are willing to pay x amt of money to another site each time a user clicks on your link on that other site (thus, you pay-per-click). GoTo.com is the prime example of a PPC SE, wherein you bid $.05 and up for exact keywords (e.g., foods high in potassium) and every time someone clicks on your link on GoTo that says foods high in potassium, GoTo charges yr acct for the amt you agreed to pay.

PPC = P.P.C. = Pay Per Click. See pay-per-click.

Positioning Also See Ranking. The process of ordering web sites or web pages by a search engine or a directory so that the most relevant sites appear first in the search results for a particular query. Software such as PositionAgent, Rank This and Webposition can be used to determine how a URL is positioned for a particular search engine when using a particular search phrase. The GoHip Search site allows you to see positioning information from many of the big search engines, displayed all on one page.

Positioning Technique A method of modifying a web page so that search engines (or a particular search engine) treat the page as more relevant to a particular query (or a set of queries).

Ranking The rank or position that a web page gets on a SE when there is a search for its targeted keywords.

Referrer The URL of the web page from which a visitor came. The server's referrer log file will indicate this. If a visitor came directly from a search engine listing, the query used to find the page will usually be encoded in the referer URL, making it easy to see which keywords are bringing visitors. The referer information can also be accessed as document.referrer within JavaScript or via the HTTP_REFERER environment variable (accessible from scripting languages).

Refresh Tag Also Meta Refresh Tag. See the paragraph about HTTP_EQUIV under Meta Tag. Used to send a user from one web page to another w/o any click on the user's part. This trick was used historically in SEO to get a page highly ranked for a popular term (imagine how may searches are made for 'Survivor' or 'Britney Spears') and on the highly ranked page, they would put a Refresh Tag to send the user to another website that may have nothing to do w/ 'Survivor' or 'Britney Spears'. This is a complete waste of everyone's time (although at a meaningless level it does deliver visitors to a website). Most SE's are wise to this, and will index the final page and/or reduce the ranking or penalize your site, or even ban it.

Registration The process of informing a search engine or directory that a new web page or web site should be indexed. The act of submitting a website to a SE.

Relevancy Algorithm The method a search engine or directory uses to match the keywords in a query with the content of each web page, so that the web pages found can be ordered suitably in the query results. Each search engine or directory is likely to use a different algorithm, and to change or improve its algorithm from time to time.

Re-submission Repeating the search engine registration process one or more times for the same page or site. Under certain circumstances, this is regarded with suspicion by the search engines, as it could indicate that someone is experimenting with spamming techniques. The Infoseek and Altavista search engines are particularly vulnerable to spamming because they list sites very quickly, and are thus easy to experiment with. Both engines de-list sites for repeated re-submission and Infoseek, for example, does not allow more than one submission of the same page in a 24 hour period. Occasional re-submission of changed pages is not normally a problem.

Robot Any browser program which follows hypertext links and accesses web pages but is not directly under human control. Examples are the search engine spiders, the "harvesting" programs which extract e-mail addresses and other data from web pages and various intelligent web searching programs. A database of web robots is maintained by Webcrawler.

robots.txt A text file stored in the top level directory of a web site to deny access by robots to certain pages or sub-directories of the site. Only robots which comply with the Robots Exclusion Standard will read and obey the commands in this file. Robots will read this file on each visit, so that pages or areas of sites can be made public or private at any time by changing the content of robots.txt before re-submitting to the search engines. The simple example below attempts to prevent all robots from visiting the /secret directory:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /secret

SE's = A server or a collection of servers dedicated to indexing internet web pages, storing the results and returning lists of pages which match particular queries. The indexes are normally generated using spiders. Google and AltaVista are pure SE's although the term, SE, is also often used to describe both directories and search engines.

SE Verification We verify whether your site is indexed on each SE or not. A "yes" means that yr site is indexed (registered) w/ that SE on the day we verified. If yr site is Not indexed when we verify, we re-submit yr site to that SE and indicate that action w/ a "re-submit".

The Verification says nothing about a site's ranking or positions on any SE. That information is shown in the Web Position Report (WP Rpt), which we run at Week 26. We estimate it takes that long to show decent rankings (positions).

In 1996, we ran the WP Rpt at 8 weeks, which was more than enough time to show results. In 1998 we pushed the WP Rpt back to 16 weeks, which was the length of time it took back then to show decent results. In 2000 we pushed the WP Rpt back to 26 weeks. Hopefully, we will not have to allow even more time to wait for decent results, but I wouldn't be surprised. For now, 26 weeks is sufficient time to wait.

FWIW, the results should peak at about Week 36.

The SE Verification / Resubmission takes place at Weeks 4, 6, 8, 10, 14, 18, 22 and 26. It is necessary to do this so many times b/c in the first weeks a site may drop in and out of certain SE's more than once, so we need to find out quickly and re-submit yr site, otherwise the original submission was for nothing.

SEO = Search Engine Optimization, a catch-all term for any work done to try to influence the rankings of your website on the SE's, so that your site ranks higher than it otherwise would. Originally, the term meant something specific like "Search Engine Optimization is the process of ensuring that each of the various elements that the search engines evaluate within your web site, (title, meta tags, links, keyword density, etc.) are optimized so as to achieve high rankings for your site on the SE's."

Spamdexing The alteration or creation of a document with intent to deceive an electronic catalog or filing system. Any technique that increases the potential position of a site at the expense of the quality of the search engine's database can also be regarded as spamdexing - also known as spamming or spoofing.

Spider That part of a search engine which surfs the web, storing the URLs and indexing the keywords and text of each page it finds. Please refer to the Search Engine Watch SpiderSpotting Chart for details of individual spiders. See also Robot.

Spidering The process of surfing the web, storing URLs and indexing keywords, links and text. Typically, even the largest search engines cannot spider all of the pages on the net. This is due to the huge amount of data available, the speed at which the new data appears, the use of politeness windows and practical limits on the number of pages that can be visited in a given time . The search engines have to make compromises in order to visit as many sites as possible, and they do this in different ways. For example, some only index the home pages of each site, some only visit sites they're explicitly told about, and some make judgements about the importance of sites (from number and quality of inbound links) before "digging deeper" into the subpages of a site.

Submission see Registration

Title Tag The text contained between the start and end HTML tags of the same name. This text is associated with (but not displayed in) the web page containing these tags, and is displayed in a special position (usually at the top of the window) by the web browser. Title text is important because it normally forms the link to the page from the search engine listings, and because the search engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing the page. Don't confuse this text with heading text within the web page which often looks like the title. Usually this will be rendered either using the HTML heading tags or just rendered with a large font size.

Traffic The visitors to a web page or web site. Also refers to the number of visitors, hits, accesses etc. over a given period.

Unique Visitor A real visitor to a web site. Web servers record the IP addresses of each visitor, and this is used to determine the number of real people who have visited a web site. If for example, someone visits twenty pages within a web site, the server will count only one unique visitor (because the page accesses are all associated with the same IP address) but twenty page accesses. See also hit and page view.

Verif = Verification. See SE Verification.

WebPosition Also WebPosition Gold or WPG. The software which allows one to check the ranking for a website on all the SE's at one and get a report showing the results. This report is the standard used in SEO. WPG was the first of this type of software to give accurate results. WPG is very successful and as such has sown the seeds of its own destruction. The huge number of searches made to the SE's each day by people using WPG is becoming a bandwidth issue for some of the SE's, so they try to block searches made with WPG. Northern Light has been removed from WPG's list of SE's that it searches and the crisis right now for WPG is that Google (the most important SE as of March, 2001) is taking serious action against websites that check its rankings using WPG.

WPG WebPosition Gold. See Web Position