Web Site Promotion Scam site submission and search engine lead times

Web Site Promotion Scam site submission and search engine lead times Has your inbox been flooded with emails from online promotion companies shortly after you submit your web site to the search engines and Yahoo? Be very careful how you proceed, because these companies could be online scam artists. Here is why. First, all search engine and directory submissions have lead times. What this means is that your web site or web page is submitted to the search engine, the site has been recorded by the search engine spider, but it will take some time before your web page is added to the search engine catalogue. For a directory, your site must be reviewed first, accepted into the directory, and then added to the catalogue. The time between submission and addition to the catalogue is called the lead time. Lead times vary from a few days to a few months. In fact, most web pages are not added to a search engine catalogue for at least 2 weeks following submission, barring any technical difficulties. Now, we've noticed that the spam mail usually comes after a Yahoo submission, but we're sure other promotion companies have found similar trends. If you have a new web site and if your site was recently submitted into the search engines and Yahoo, when you get an email stating that your site is nowhere to be found in the search engines, delete that email. Your site has not had enough time to be added to the catalogues, and these scam artists are trying to take advantage of peoples' ignorance about lead times. If you hired a good search engine optimization specialist, your site will show up eventually, just not immediately. Also, these scam companies assume that they can figure out your keywords and key phrases just by looking at your meta-tags on one page. Good online marketing specialists know how to strategically place keywords throughout your site, not just in the meta-tags, for optimum search engine indexing. They know how to use singulars and plurals, synonyms, and well-written headings throughout your entire site. Just because one keyword does not get you in a Top 10 position does not mean that your site cannot be found on search engines. Only you can determine which keywords and key phrases people are using on the search engines and directories to find you (on your site reports). You might find that people are finding your site using a certain phrase or your service and a location name, such as "web site designer Illinois." Once you determine how people are finding your site, then you can adjust the HTML coding accordingly. So please don't be in such a rush to hire these scam artists. They are relying on your ignorance of search engine and directory lead times to scam you out of your hard-earned money. They will continue to spam you even when your site is listed well in the search engines and directories.

Copywriting For Search Engines & Directories

To get optimal listings in search engine and directory queries, keywords and key concepts must be placed strategically throughout your web pages. To summaries, you need these words and phrases in:

1. Title tags

2. Meta-tags (keywords and descriptions)

3. Headings (if used)

4. Body text, and

Alt-attribute in the image source tags
When online marketing professionals optimize a web site for search engine and directory queries, they should not spend most of their time redesigning the layout (in HTML) or submitting the site to the search engines. Most of their time should be spent on researching, writing good copy that will index well in search engines, and writing thorough, accurate descriptions for directory submissions. Good web copy must contain well-researched and varied keywords and key concepts based on a web page's topic; accurately reflect the web pages' content; and be strategically placed throughout a web page as mentioned above.

Most sales and advertising "fluff" should be eliminated.

Here's an example (and one of our pet peeves). How many of you have seen this scam, "Put your printed brochure on the web!" Print advertising copy contains a lot of "fluff" phrases such as "service that is second to none." Search engine analysis? "Service" is a stop word in some search engines and will be ignored in a search query. "Second to none?" How many people do you know really search using that phrase? When we are looking for something on the web, we are going to type in exactly the type of product or service we are looking for, not sales and advertising "fluff."

Web copywriting should contain keywords and key concepts without all the "fluff." Web copy has to flow and be strategically placed to get your web pages ranked well in search engine and directory queries. Your potential customers will also appreciate being able to find what they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible. That's just good customer service.

The one time that web copywriting is extremely important is your site submission to Yahoo. Although Yahoo reserves the right to change or modify the site description you send them, if you can submit a well-written description containing your most important keywords and key concepts without word stacking, Yahoo will likely keep most of your description intact.

Good copywriting is a necessary element of both online and offline marketing. If you do not have experience in writing good copy for the web, we recommend that you hire an online marketing consultant to initially write the copy for you. Then you can learn from the copy you paid for. The more practice you get at web copywriting, the better you will get at it.