Website Marketing and Promotion: Current Trends in Search Engines

Search engines are critical to the success of your business. They are an important way for interested customers to find your site. Search engines are going through many changes, and last year's "dot com fallout" has added to transformations underway. Now's a good time to look at what's going on and see how you can benefit.

Yahoo, LookSmart and NBCi.com now offer paid "Business Express Submissions" -- listings that bring hits and page relevancy to your site. These types of listings are now essential to your success on the Internet. We recommend including them in your budget just as you would other forms of advertising.

Inktomi search engine technology drives three of the major search engines: AOL, Google and Yahoo. Preferred placement listings through Inktomi give you better placement on these engines. Although the prices for these listings continues to rise, you can't afford to be without them. If you want to maintain your visibility on the search engines, these are the ones to invest in.

Yahoo sponsored categories work best for those in either of two categories: 1) business and economy or 2) shopping and services. If you are a national company in either of these categories, it's worth looking at. However, if your business is regional, there are better options for you to invest in.

What's new and exciting? Metacrawlers are engines driven by ads, business express, and pay-per-click for the top results and all the free stuff afterwards. Who's leading the pack? Goto.com partnered with Altavista, AOL, MSN, Metacrawler, Dogpile and others. Findwhat.com partnered with Excite, Metacrawler and Dogpile. In our opinion, these are the search engines of the future

For those with promotional domains more than 2 years old, it's probably time to redesign your site. It's an important part of staying fresh and relevant for today's Internet users. Doing this can usually improve traffic (rbh) as much as 30-40%.

For additional information regarding search engines and site promotion, we invite you to review our promotional and marketing pages. Several links on these pages will also allow you test your current site profie and position.

Now's the time to get lean and mean. Join the services that are going to benefit you. Be ready for the next dot com rush! Contact us at sales@tightweb.com. We can analyze your website and keywords, and provide a customized quote for website promotion.