Newsletter Archive

Issue 1-1 Contents:

AddWeb is now Officially #1!
From the techs: Zero in on your keywords
Ghosting... do you really want to do it?
Did you know? How to remove dead links from search engines.
New top level domain names to come
FFA Sites - Love 'em or hate 'em
Register with NSI and get quick Inktomi listings
This click goes to the highest bidder?
Sign Up for this Newsletter
Other Issues

It's Official: AddWeb is #1!

We've always known that AddWeb is the best, but now it seems the word is out. According to PC Data reports for software sales during the year 2000, AddWeb Website Promoter is not only #1 selling, but has sold more than all other Internet Marketing titles combined. AddWeb is also the highest grossing software application in the hot 'web software' category, claiming 17.5% of gross sales, and 14.9% of total units sold in this category.

Among ALL Internet software applications, AddWeb ranks 35th in a field of 2,010 titles, placing it in the top 2% of all Internet titles. Finally, in the most general category of 'Business' (this includes everything from Windows ME to Quicken), AddWeb ranked #329 in a field of 16,323 applications, also in the top 2% of all business titles.

We would like to shout out a booming THANK YOU to all of our loyal users.

From the techs: Zero in on your keywords top

Our technical support department knows better than anyone what people are doing to promote with our software. After all, when you call us, they are the guys looking at your pages and figuring out what you are doing wrong (or doing right).

So each month, we will feature articles directly from our tech support department. This month we look at keywords. We have noticed that many of our customers get 'keyword happy' on their pages. Some have meta tags with hundreds of keywords on them. This will often cause your site to rank horribly (if at all). Most of the search engines have ways of sensing what they consider to be spam, and hundreds of keywords, or repeated words, may fall into their spam category.

That can cause your site to do poorly. Instead, think about what your site is about. Choose ten to 15 keywords and key phrases and use them. When considering them, try to think from the perspective of your potential customer. What would he or she type into a search engine? Finally make sure the rest of your page(s) relate to those terms. Look at your title, your descriptioon, links, and the actual content of your page(s). If it all has the same theme, you are probably way ahead of the game.

Consider that users will more often use key phrases when searching, so in your meta tags, concentrate on key phrases! For example, if you were searching for business telephones, you would more likely do a search for 'business telephone systems' than 'phones'. So if one of your meta keywords is 'business telephone systems', you have a high chance of ranking well with it.

Ghosting... do you really want to do it?

Some people have been able to achieve top positions on search engines by using programs designed to analyze an incoming visitor to a website before the web server actually delivers the page. When they see the visitor, they look at who that visitor is, and if it is recognized as a search engine spider, they show the spider a page designed to score well on that specific engine. If the visitor is not a spider, a page is displayed that is designed to be attractive to humans, not search engines. This is often referred to as ghosting. The obvious benefits are clear. You can trick search engines into giving your site a high position, while having actual web pages that would otherwise get lost in nowhere land if a search engine saw them. Now you know the single reason you would want to employ ghosting techniques. There many reasons why you should avoid it like the plague. The search engines have more or less taken a stand that they consider it spam. Alta Vista says: "Some other people submit pages that present our spider with content that differs from what users will see. We strongly discourage these practices... We do not allow URL submissions from customers who spam the index and will exclude all such pages from the index". Go network says "Attempts to spam or subvert the Go.com index will result in the exclusion of an entire site and/or domain from the Go.com index". The same warnings can be found on just about every engine. The bottom line is that search engine spiders are being updated regularly to catch activities such as this, and it is worth condsidering that the consequences of ghosting can easily get your entire site banned forever. You are better off at number 10 than 0.

Did you know? How to remove dead links from search engines.

How many times have you seen a listing on a search engine, only to find that it was a dead link? Most people don't consider reporting the dead links because they don't belong to their own site. But consider doing searches on keywords
that are relevant to your own site, and follow every link above your own. You might find some dead links. Reporting them can be an easy way to boost your own position while helping the search engine maintain a clean index. Imagine your site is listed at number 11, and there is a dead link above it. Getting it removed will boost you to #10, which is often on the first page. You can report dead links on most major engines. Simply go to the site and look in their help section or add url section. There you will usually see instructions for removing the dead links. On engines that spider, simply submitting the dead link can sometimes automatically cause it to be removed.

New top level domains selected.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN - www.icann.org) has added seven new top level domains (TLD, and more are expected in coming months. .PRO for professionals like Lawyers and Doctors, and .BIZ for businesses. This opens up great new opportunities for new top-level-domains. Have you ever wanted that great, easy to remember four or five letter name, well now's your chance.

So how does this affect you in terms of web promotion? You will want to snatch up names as fast as you can that consist of keywords important to your website. Keep in mind that some engines factor the domain name into the ranking game. If you own www.fishing.com, you have an increased chance of ranking highly with fishing related searches. You may soon have the chance to own www.fishing.web or www.fishing.shop. Keep your eyes on the horizon and seize the opportunity as soon as you can. Another gold rush is just around the corner. To read more check out ICANN's link on the subject. http://www.icann.org/tlds/

FFA Sites - Love 'em or hate 'em

Spam Spam Spam Spam (Sing along). We know, FFA sites mean spam. We have customers that live by them, and those that... well... don't. Those of you that don't may not have considered the value they propose. It is highly unlikely that you will get a flood of traffic from FFA listings. It is only slightly more likely that you will get any direct traffic at all from them. So why do we include the ability to submit to hundreds of thousands of FFA sites? It can all be summed up in two words: LINK COUNT. On some engines, every time there is a link to your website, your link count is increased. The more instances of your url found in such case, the higher your site will rank on relevant keyword searches Simply put, FFA Sites can help boost your position. Thousands of these FFA sites are indexed by major search engines. If while your site is listed on an FFA site, it is indexed by en engine, you just got an additional link in the engine. Finally, while you are unlikely to get traffic from the FFA sites, as long as you are submitting to the majors, you might as well submit to these as well. You might just get that one important visitor that leads to the big sale.

On the subject of spam, try to set up a specific mailbox just for submitting to the FFA sites. Don't use your normal box or you will be hammered with messages selling you a million ways to make a million in a day.

Register with NSI and get quick Inktomi listings

The only way to get listed on search engines is to use AddWeb (Cough Cough). OK, AddWeb is a great way, but we want you to know what you can do to speed up the process in any way you can. On August 2 2000, Inktomi and Network Solutions announced that they have entered into an agreement that will allow people registering domains through NSI to get immediate listings in Inktomi's database. Inktomi's database serves more than 125 search engines, including AOL, IWon and MSN. It appears that this will not be a free service, but may become the fastest way to get indexed on Inktomi-powered engines.

This click goes to the highest bidder?

Goto.com, Looksmart, About.com.... It seems everyone is going to paid listings. Some believe it violates the purity of a search engine, while others feel it is a great way to make sure you are on top. Whichever side of the fence you are on, it is still far less expensive than banner advertising. So how do you do it right? Cyberspace HQ has invested thousands during the past few months with about.com. We selected about 25 keyword/phrases to bid on, as well as top level categories. The results have been excellent. However, we have studied our inbound traffic generated by these links to see the difference in being number 1, versus 2,3,4, and 5. We did this because we have noticed that there is always a war between a few companies to occupy the #1 spot. On hot keywords, the difference between #1 and #3 can be as much as a dollar or more. If you get 1,000 clicks, that dollar can mean the difference of $1,000.00. What we found
was refreshing. At the beginning of our effort, we made sure we were always #1 on all of our bids. In 3 weeks, we spent about $3,000.00 on about.com. It drove roughly 2,000 clicks to our site in that period. We then decided to fund our
account with $1,000.00 and reduce our bids to place us in the 3rd to 5th positions, causing our bids on click-through to be considerably lower. In the following 3 weeks, we experienced no decline in traffic generated by these links whatsoever, yet we saved $2,000.00. By the way, we used AddWeb 4 to gather this data ;-).

Our conclusion is simply that when it comes to pay-per-click bidding sites, don't get trapped in the war for the #1 position. If your competition wants to engage in such a battle, let them waste their money. You are likely to see that the fight for #3 is far more relaxed than the fight for #1 in most cases, and if you script your link text well, many people are likely to skip #1 and #2 in favor of your link!