Search Engines, Search Engines, Search Engines

============================= In This Issue: ============================= 1) Search Engines - the Magnificent 7 2) Search Engines - great new tools 3) Search Engines - time limited SBI! bargain I'm working on the next release of PDCB and have been doing a LOT of Search Engine (SE) research. It's an area where there are still more questions than answers, but a small number of VERY KEY things have become blindingly clear. This issue is dedicated to a this ESSENTIAL subject. ============================= 1) Search Engines ============================= There are only 7 SEs that matter for driving traffic to your site. Yes - just 7. Put these URLs in your favourites list and every day (no more, no less) submit one page from each of your sites (domains). Open 2 browser windows and it only takes a couple of minutes to work your way down the list. If you have an automated submission tool like Submit Wolf ... http://www.practicalselling.com/pdcb/0000/to.cgi?submitwolf ... then by all means use it to continue submitting to the other x thousand SEs - but take the magnificent 7 out of the submission list and do them by hand. AltaVista http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=addurl Excite http://www.excite.com/info/add_url Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html HotBot http://www.hotbot.com/addurl.asp Go/InfoSeek http://infoseek.go.com/AddUrl?pg=SubmitUrl.html Lycos http://www.lycos.com/addasite.html Northern Light http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html All these SEs use spiders to crawl through your site and find your pages. They might, but they're not reliable, so work your way through all your pages. Note - this list doesn't inlcude the human-edited directory sites like Yahoo, ODP, Snap etc. At time of writing, Yahoo was starting to make mandatory charges for commercial submissions so I'm going to come back to that another day. ============================= 2) Search Engines ============================= Last week I was invited to download a set of reports by Michael Campbell. Michael is referred to in PDCB for his success in selling large volumes of "real world" products on the internet - in a highly competitive field - with little or no advertsing budget. He did this by dominating the search engines - it's documented in his book "Nothing But 'Net": http://www.practicalselling.com/pdcb/0000/to.cgi?net For some time, Michael has had a subscription service on SE optimization, but now he's released a series of 3 reports on fundamental SE matters. It's real do-able stuff for people like you and me. To be frank, some of it sails a little close to the wind - Michael calls them "dirty tricks" - but I think the combination of his advanced techniques and a little caution are a powerful mix. I found a few real gems that are so easy to do - and obvious when you know about them. I've been busy working them into 3 or 4 existing web-sites - and have created a few new sites (but you'll need to read the reports to understand why =;>). http://www.practicalselling.com/pdcb/0000/to.cgi?SEP Talking about existing vs new sites ... When creating a site about something you're interested in, you have a fundamental choice to make. Either: Design it the way you think it should look with all the stuff you're interested in. Please yourself. Or: Design it to attract traffic from the search engines. Please them. I'm not saying the 2 things are completely contradictory, but it is more difficult to take an existing site and make it search engine friendly. Better to understand the key principles that will influence SE positioning and build a site that works for the SEs - then see how you make it user friendly too. Of course - this only matters if you want to do business or otherwise influence people through your site. If that doesn't matter, then you can just please yourself! ============================= 3) Search Engines ============================= I have been enjoying a real bargain for the last few weeks - courtesy of Ken Evoy. Please yourself, please your visitors - or please the SEs? That's a problem that Ken completely understands. How can mere mortals produce a subject-focuses site that contains content to satisfy visitors and directory editors, and pulls strong SE traffic - and delivers motivated customers to commercial offers. Tough brief? Listen, I could write a whole report on what I'm about to tell you, but I'm going to cut to the chase as time is of the essence. Ken's company has produced a whole raft of excellent e-commerce tools for "the rest of us". He has been wildly successful and I love his products. He is about to release his most important product yet - "Site Build IT!" (SBI!). SBI! is kinda hard to explain. It's a whole bunch of things including web hosting, domain management, page creation, traffic tracking, SE optimization, but it's a lot more too. SBI! is a complete environment and process for creating a themed, content-based site that will rank highly in the SEs - but can be created by anyone with no html or programming knowledge. It takes care of links, submissions, affiliate programs, page design, etc etc - and has a phenomenal client application that will be a powerhouse for creating themes, keywords, Pay Per Click strategies etc etc etc. ... and more is being added all the time. But it's not released yet. And I can't tell you how much it will cost because it will be dynamically priced according to demand. The only way you can get a SBI! site right now is as a "5 Pillar" affiliate. The 5 Pillar affiliate program is already my top recommendation, it's free to join - and 5P affiliates can currently buy any number of SBI! sites for CAD$139 (approx. US$95). That's domain registration, hosting, etc etc etc. I bought one a few weeks ago, and I'm going to nail down a couple more at that price right now - because this will ONLY LAST FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS. Once SBI! is released, affiliates will pay the same as everyone else. So - if you're at all interested in producing a themed site that the SEs will love, sign up with the 5P program today, and order your SBI! You can take care of domain names and so on later - the main thing is to reserve the site right now. Follow the link below - and then the "5 Pillar" links on the page: http://www.practicalselling.com/pdcb/0000/to.cgi?5pap note - there seemed to be some 'net problems getting to this site earlier today, but it should be ok now) Once you have access to the 5 Pillar Club area, you will be able to order your SBI! Ken has also massively updated and expanded his free affiliate training course which I recommend to everyone - whether or not you choose to be a 5 Pillar affiliate. It's even more aligned with the principles and practices I cover in PDCB - I humbly think everyone should take this course ! Send a blank email to tamspracticalselling@sitesell.net mailto:tamspracticalselling@sitesell.net ============================= That's all folks - keep the feedback coming as always. mailto:feedback@practicalselling.com Stewart =============================