What are the + and - traits to promoting your online or mortar business on sites like Yahoo & Google?

Answer 1

When you are promoting your business on search engines, you have two options:

1. Pay your way around using their pay per click products such as Google Adwords http://www.google.com/adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com . Yahoo and Google also have local directories and classified ads that you may want to consider being listed.

2. Rank high in the natural search, which means your business are so loved by the search engines

First, make sure that you submit your website to the search engines. It takes anywhere from 2 weeks to even 6 months for websites to show up in the search engines. In some cases, a website will show up after 2 weeks of being online, only to disappear for maybe 3-6 months (which is called Google sandbox, though Yahoo to a certain extent also does)

With Yahoo, you can go to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit to submit your site for free. For guaranteed inclusion in their search engine, you have to pay and use their paid services http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

Ranking high in the search engines, however, is a tougher ballgame. Search engines look at the following factors in ranking websites, though in varying degrees of importance:

- Age = an older site stand a higher chance of getting better rankings than newer sites because they are more established (especially if considered an authority in the field) and a lot more incoming links

- Quality and Uniqueness of the Content = sites rank well if they have content that users consider relevant and original, not rehashed or using content used by hundred other websites (e.g. articles in article submission directories)

- Keyword density = number of times the keyword appears on the site. This also includes having the keywords in important places such as the title, metatags, even H1s and H2s

- How it fares in the results = when it comes up in the search engines, are people clicking on it or not. If not, search engines consider the site to be not relevant to the keyword. Also, how long does the user stay on the site; if they hit the back button immediately, then the site may not be relevant to the search term

- Site structure = on-page factors to sitemaps

- Backlinks = who are linking to the site and what are their quality (the more authoritative the site linking to your site, the better).

If you are going to read only one piece on search engine optimization, I suggest you read Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld.com's "Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone: 26 steps to 15k a day." http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/2010.htm

WebmasterWorld.com http://www.webmasterworld.com has different sections that cover various aspects of search engine optimization, and each section is participated in by respected webmasters and even search engine employees (e.g. there's a GoogleGuy that responds to Google topics)

Other resources that can help you get top ranking in the search engines are:

Google Press Releases http://googlepress.blogspot.com/
Matt Cutts Blog http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ (Matt is a Google software engineer)
Digitalpoint Yahoo Forums http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=6
SearchEngineWatch's MSN Forums http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/forumdisplay.php?f=8

As for tools to help you get top rankings in the search engine, here are some of the best in the field today

Total Optimizer Pro http://www.totaloptimizer.com/
Keyword density tool http://googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php
Google Sitemaps (to help Google index your pages faster) https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview?hl=en
SEO Book - lots of free great SEO tools http://tools.seobook.com/

Answer 2

+ve You get lots of traffic, it can work...

-ve You pay allot for it and the jury is out whether there is any great benefit depending on the industrial sector you are in...some businesses are wholy inappropraite for search engine marketing