Search Engine Placement
Google changes everything.
Up to now, the key to the internet has been directories and search engines. A mom-and-pop website that managed to get top position for the phrase "cell phone" in a top search engine was generating $1,000,000 of sales per quarter, earning 10% commissions from affiliate programs. What this website did was to figure out the combination of keywords and phrases that the search engine liked- nothing else.
The current trend in search engines has been to start putting a lot of weight onto the frequency and quality of sites that link to a particular web page. Led by Google, the new breed of search engines get astoundingly good results, at least in part because they're very hard to rig with keyword stuffing and the like. Slowly but surely, the economic power of sites with rich, properly presented content is growing back up to where it should be, and the days of the keyword sharpshooters are numbered.
Having other sites link to your web site is now of growing economic value. In order for a site to have value in link-based search engines, it is important to:
- Have a lot of freely available content.
- Expose the site to indexing robots.
- Give webpages useful titles.
- Receive links in ways that don't confuse spidering robots. This can be tricky and engine-dependent. Examples are how spiders deal with redirection and sites served from databases.
Here's a sample list of sites that have earned Google's top placement by virtue of good linking, along with a measure of how valuable this is in a bid-for-placement search engine:
| $/click at GoTo | KEYWORD | GOOGLE'S TOP RATED SITE |
| $1.51 | "research" | The Materials Research Society http://www.mrs.org/ (Openly client) |
| $0.70 | "engineering" | mechanical engineering home page http://www.memagazine.org/ |
| $0.66 | "medicine" | Nature Medicine: Home http://medicine.nature.com/ |
| $0.56 | "science" | Space Telescope Science Institute Home Page http://www.stsci.edu/ |
| $0.53 | "semiconductor" | MRS Internet J. of Nitride Semicond. Res. http://nsr.mij.mrs.org/ (Openly client) |
| $0.49 | "psychology" | Journal of Pediatric Psychology http://jpepsy.oupjournals.org/ |
| $0.44 | "chemistry" | Journal of Biological Chemistry http://www.jbc.org/ |
| $0.37 | "nature" | Nature Medicine: Home http://medicine.nature.com/ |
| $0.31 | "physics" | Univ. of Pennsylvania http://dept.physics.upenn.edu/ |
| $0.28 | "mathematics" | Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics http://www.siam.org/ |
Notes:
- Goto.com is a search engine that allows sites to bid on the top spot in the results page for a specific search term.
- Data collected September 30, 2000.
As linking-based search engines become more and more popular, sites with high link-generated placement will be able to generate significant collateral revenue for savvy publishers.
Openly Informatics can help you increase your placement in link based search engines. We have experience determining what Google likes, and what it doesn't. If your low-ranked website needs traffic and/or revenue, you can't afford not to give us a call!
