It’s all the rage
SEO – or ‘search engine optimisation’ is all the rage these days, with hosting companies and web designers all promising they’ll get you to the top of Google’s search rankings … for a price!
The first part of this complex process of course is submitting your URL to search engines in the first place.
I’ve thought about this aspect of web marketing a lot while I’ve been working on my own sites … and the crucial issue of ‘to pay or not to pay?’ has reared it’s ugly head.
I’m going to admit that I have paid for a basic search engine submission service … but I’m beginning to think that I needn’t have bothered now.
Starting the search
As part of my voyage to set up and run some (hopefully!) commercial websites, I enrolled on a 12 week New Entrepreneur Scholarship course to help me with the basics.
One of the lovely things about this course is that they give you ‘start-up’ cash for your new business, so I budgeted a bit for SEO to give some of my sites a head start.
I decided to go with Namesco’s service, mainly because I was building a website for a course colleague at the time (thememoryknotcompany.co.uk), she was already hosted with Namesco and I stumbled across their SEO service while I was working on this project.
This is the link to their SEO page and I went for the basic £19.99 service, which seemed a good place to start.
The process is simple enough, they help you to come up with some decent meta tags for your site, then they automatically submit them to loads of search engines.
And they really do … I’m ashamed to admit that I checked a few of the more obscure search engines out, just to see if I appear in them. I do!
Money down the drain?
Since submitting some on my sites to search engines in this way, I’ve been reading more about the marketing process and do you know what? I think I might have saved myself a few bob by not bothering.
You’ll have noticed by now that I’m a big fan of the ‘…for Dummies’ books as they pitch just right for people like you and me who know a bit, but still need to know a lot more.
Starting and Running an Online Business for Dummies (For Dummies)
Google > 49.2% of searches
Yahoo! > 23.8% of searches
MSN Search > 9.6% of searches
(Nielson NetNetratings from July 2006)
So if you manually submit your links to those three search engines, you’re going to hit 82.6% of all searches and you’re going to be listed in the all-important Google.
Let me save you £19.99 …
Here are the links to the top 3 from that list … submit your URLs via those links and you’ve saved £19.99 per website. I wish I’d known that before I forked out those fees!
However, submitting your URL to the search engines isn’t the whole picture and it still takes tweaking, skill and black magic to get your site to the top of the rankings.
I’ll be returning to SEO in the future.