At Grantastic Designs, we see an overwhelming, recurring problem when we give site evaluations. Many of the web sites we evaluate are not designed for optimum search engine and directory placement. What makes us uneasy is that many of these sites were already coded and submitted (to search engines) previously. We hate to see people and companies lose hundreds of dollars because they put trust in a group of people that do not know what they are doing.
If you hire anyone (a submission service, a web hosting and/or design service, an online promotion service, etc.) to do online web promotion services, the persons in charge of your site promotion must have the following qualifications:
* HTML and graphic design/layout experience
* General knowledge of search engines and directories
* Online marketing and submission experience, and
* Excellent web copywriting skills
Ask a lot of questions about the promotion service before handing over any money. For example, why can it be a bad idea to include an image map at the top of your web pages? A good online marketing company will be able to tell you that (a) many search engines cannot follow links in an image map, so the site has to have links elsewhere as well, and (b) image maps tend to be rather large images, thus increasing your site's download time (too much download time means less people navigating your site).
A good online marketing company will also know how to code your site and get it indexed well if it is a framed site. Ask the marketing company how they would get a framed site indexed well on Google. Google does not use meta-tag content to determine relevancy. Some possible answers are (a) having a new entry page, or (b) including text and links in the noframes tag. If the online marketing company gives these answers, have the online marketing professional explain to you how and why these (or other) layout strategies will work for your web site.
Can the online marketing company tell you the most popular search engines and their affiliations? Most of your traffic will probably come from AltaVista, Google, Lycos, FAST Search, MSN Search, HotBot, or AOL Search. If you are listed in Yahoo (which is a directory, not a search engine — quiz them on that, too), you might find a significant amount of your traffic comes from both the main Yahoo and, if applicable, a regional Yahoo. How will your marketing company get you listed in Yahoo?
That's just the beginning. You do not want your web site to be permanently banned from a search engine or directory due to ignorance or lack of copywriting experience. Beware the promotion company that GUARANTEES a Top 10 or 20 listing. They are probably spammers and their efforts will get your site permanently banned from search engines. No one can guarantee a top search engine position without spamming. A good web site title is descriptive BUT also accurately reflects the content of your site. A good 10-50 word description (for the meta tag and the description submitted to directories) also contains strategic keywords and accurately reflects the content of your site. Good copywriting is a necessary element of both online and offline marketing.
A good web promotion company will also teach you how to monitor your site reports and help you modify your own site when site traffic diminishes.
A good web promotion company will also admit when they don't specialize in any aspect of web promotion (banner advertising is quite different from site submission, for example) and should be able to refer you to a company that can help you.
We have watched clients miss Christmas gift-buying rushes and other date-targeted sales promotions because they placed trust in a group of programmers and designers who claimed to know Java and HTML, but not online promotion. They just hear, "We submit your site to 200+ search engines!" If people asked intelligent, educated questions and spend more time educating themselves on web site promotion, rip-off artists would not be making money on the web.
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