American Web Company

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT, MANAGEMENT, AND HOSTING

    A New Business Revolution Will Affect You...                                    
The Internet Revolution.  Embrace It.

          Search Engines                                                                                 

There are three ways to bring visitors to your web site; incoming links, advertising and promotion, and search engines.

Bringing in incoming links is time consuming. An incoming link can only be programmed at the end of the link that the link comes from. It requires contact with the site you want the link from. Free incoming links are available but the results are unpredictable. Your vendors will often provide free incoming links but they may be tied to quotas or exclusivity demands. The productivity of an incoming link depends on the market you serve. Quality varies from market to market. The American Web Co. offers our services in this area at an hourly rate but we cannot promise results.

All your advertising and promotions should be accompanied by your www. If you are interested in banner ads or other form of web advertising we can create them for you. Our specialty is coding your site to be found by search engines.

There are 1550 search engines. 95% of the business in the US comes from eight of them. American Web design recommends submittal to  ten search engines, the top eight plus two fast growing alternatives. We have access to a service that applies sites to all or most of the rest of the 1550 for a cost of $29 to $89. We have tried it and found it marginally useful.

The ten primary search engines we are: Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek, Alta Vista, Magellan, Webcrawler, Hot Bot, Lycos, Northern Light and Google. Alta Vista takes less than 48 hours to get into.  Infoseek can be almost as quick. Yahoo can be as little as 10 days, if they accept you at all.  We apply all your pages to these search engines.

What We Do

The search engine rating game is subtle and complicated. Each search engines has different rating criteria, criteria that they change over time.  The ability to gain high positions depends on 1) skill 2) the number of sites with the same word or words competing for position. Search engines check six criteria when deciding how high to rate a site, called its relevancy. The ability to gain a high rating for your site depends on creating your site to rate well in the five criteria within our control. (The sixth criteria, the number of incoming links, is not an area that we have a lot of control). While designing your site we will often allude to design considerations targeted toward increasing the rating of your site.  

Relevancy increases with time, although if your site does not continually improve relevant to competing sites, relevancy can decrease with time.  Search engines revisit your site periodically for reevaluation.  The five controllable elements will take affect at that time, however, the search engine will only discover incoming links to your site when they visit the sites containing the links.

We use a common denominator strategy when creating a web page. In other words, we design each page in your site to rank high in the ten search engines we apply to. Our design strategy, or course, works better in some search engines than others. If you are interested in ten separate pages for each of all your pages to be applied to each search engine separately (for a ten page site this would be 100 separate page codings instead of 10 page codings), the additional cost is $20 for each page coded. As part of our basic package, at no extra cost, we code each of your pages separately, ready to submit that same page to each of the ten search engines. (For a ten page site that would be ten codings, one coding for each of the ten pages).

Once Again, About Yahoo

One last thing before we describe the five criteria a search engine pays attention to. Yahoo is not actually a search engine. This is because an actual human being will come to your site and subjectively conclude whether your site is the kind of site Yahoo feels it has a place for. Yahoo calls itself an index. We design your site to meet all of Yahoo's criteria for entrance into its exclusive club. Remember, in the end, it is a human that makes the decision, and it is estimated that Yahoo rejects over half the applications applied to its index. 

The five search engine criteria that we code for are...

1
 Your Domain Name - The letters that follow your www are highly regarded by many search engines. If you are not depending on advertising or promotion for most of your business, then consider imbedding your product or service within your domain name. Those words most often used to find your site in a word search are the words you need to consider inside your domain name.
2
 Web Site Text - The first and last sentence of a web page hold a big attraction to many search engines. We often place a single sentence chocked full with key words as the introduction to each web page. The text within your page is also very important. Search engines rate a page according to the percentages of a key word or words appearing in the text. This percentage varies from search engine to search engine. It is vital that your first page not be only graphics. Search engines read graphics poorly, or, as is usually the case, not at all. In addition, sites created using frames confuse many search engines. Often they will read the wrong frame on a page giving a low ranking to that page. We only create frame pages on request.
3
 Web Page Title - There are search engines for whom the title is extremely important. Your key words should appear in your title line. Every page on your site will receive a title.
4
 Hidden Description- Not visible on screen, is a coded description of your site. This is a single full sentence with your key words within the text of the sentence. Many search engines pay close attention to this criteria.
5
 Hidden Key Words - Not visible on screen, is a list of key words associated with your site. Some search engines will note eightly or more words in this coded section. The more words used, the lower some search engines will rate any single word. The trick is making sure specific pages on your site are densely clustered around single concepts requiring relatively few key words to get across your message. We devote your introductory or splash page to communicating the big picture: the full spread of what your site has to offer with all possible key words recorded in the key words section.
If your have questions feel free to e-mail us or just call us on the phone. If you are interested in just search engine coding consultation, there is no charge for a short conversation. The American Web Co. does code for search engines for sites already up and running.