The SearchTools.com site concentrates on search engines for web sites, e-commerce, intranets and topical portals. Web search engines attempt to index the entire web, or a significant portion thereof. To bring people to a site, you need to make sure that the web search engines know about the site and index the text on it. This is called search engine promotion or search engine optimization (SEO). Advertising using keyword based pay-per-click (PPC) systems is called search engine marketing (SEM).
There are a lot of unethical consultants and services that will claim they can guarantee you top listings. Be sure that the search engine optimization strategies you use also make a good web site, rather than faking it. Do not use hidden text, cloaking, link farms or any other gimmick to try to improve your rankings in webwide search engines: that will likely backfire.
Search Engine Optimization / Marketing Sites
- SearchEngineWatch covers
how search engines work and how to get listed and ranked. I highly recommend
this site.
- SearchEngineWorld is another
site that is devoted to promotion and optimization.
- Traffick.com provides news and
analysis on search engines, portals, and marketing via them.
- Selfpromotion.com has lots of excellent
information on this topic, and a shareware approach to promotion: you get
useful tools for free and more useful tools if you pay for them.
- Spider-Food is a cheerful and friendly
site with helpful information on dealing with search engines.
- About.com's
SEO 101
is a good
introduction to making web sites rank well in search engines by site design
and architecture.
Consultants
- Danny Sullivan, SearchEngineWatch
- the leading expert in the field, has an in-depth understanding of web
search engines.
- Shari Thurow of Grantastic
speaks and consults on this topic, understands information architecture
problems as well as search engine-specific issues.
- Jill Whalen of HighRankings.com
provides clear and useful advice on her site and as a consultant. She's
particularly good at explaining how to write focused and topical pages,
among other optimization processes.
- Andrew Goodman Page Zero Media
has specific expertise
in search engine marketing and pay-per-click keyword advertising.
- Amanda Watlington of Searching
For Profit provides
creative solutions in many areas including search traffic analysis, information
architecture and content issues.
- iProspect
is a full-service company providing both search engine optimization and
marketing solutions.