Here are the little-known search engine secrets to give you an almost unfair advantage over all those other Web marketers out there. As you read this report, we are sure you'll get excited about the additional traffic you will attract using these techniques thanks to Softech Solutions technicians who make it possible ! . Once again bringing you this important information at no charge, now you will never have to wonder what you may have been missing next time you see someone trying to sell you the same information! 

11 Power-Packed Secrets For Using Search Engines To Build A Consistent, Steady Flow Of Traffic To Your Site.

Secret #1 What to "name" your site to draw traffic like a magnet The "secret" pulling power of the word "secret"!

The name of your site has a dramatic effect on the number of visitors your site receives. Let's do a brief exercise to see how this works. Let's say you are surfing and would like to find out more information about accounting, tax laws, and ways to save money on your taxes. Just below you'll find what a typical search would present if you were to search for "accounting" in a search engine. Take a look at the following website "titles" and determine which one of these sites you would click on first.

1) Waterman, Jewel, Rathburn Accountants Home Page Statewide Financial Management. These pages are updated frequently. Check back often! This information is provided for accounting practices...

2) Frank's Accounting Practice Key Telephone Numbers. Accounting Office Reception - 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. 123-1247. Accounting Satellite Office

3) Jealously Guarded Accounting Secrets The IRS Prays You Never Find Out!
Here you'll discover 10 little known and rarely used tax deductions that the IRS would prefer you didn't know! Learn confidential, inside information by a savvy accounting professional who has firsthand knowledge.

Which one did you choose? Did you want to learn more about the Waterman Jewel, Rathburn home page? Or how about Frank's Accounting Practice? If you are like most people, you probably wanted to know what the jealously guarded IRS secrets were!
Of course!
Many websites on the Internet today have bland, boring names for titles, like the first two titles mentioned above. But the title is one of THE most important factors which determines if people come to your site! When someone does a search on a search engine, your title is often one of the ONLY things that determines if that person is going to visit your site. The savvy, astute web marketers on the Net today name their sites with exciting, provocative titles. Titles that get peoples attentions and literally "draw" them to their site.

Here is a way you can do this.

Most people LOVE to hear secrets and have an almost insatiable desire and interest to hear them. Check out the headlines of the largest circulating (Over 18 MILLION readers) weekly magazine the National Enquirer sometime. (Enquiring minds want to know!) Pick up an issue and you will receive a years worth of marketing lessons with just one sitting. You won't find one issue that doesn't mention someone's "secret" diary, or a "secret" love affair that was recently exposed. A great deal of success of this magazine has had is due to letting their readers "in" on a celebrity's or other famous person's "secret". Work the word "secrets" somehow into your website presentation and you are sure to draw some curious, interested traffic.

Here are some other curiosity provoking words; these words conjure up images of somebody "letting you in on something" or "letting something out of the bag". These are VERY powerful words.

Insider information! Revealed! Exposed! Unconcealed!

People love to be let "in" on something, so offer your audience a juicy tidbit of information to let them "in" on, and you'll generate a lot of interest and visitors to your site.

Here are some examples that illustrate this idea:

Little known deductions that will save you thousands. (accountant)

Pricing tricks furniture companies use to jack up your bill and how to avoid them. (for a furniture dealer)

What burglars fear most. (for a security company)

Secrets your teenager may be hiding. (For concerned parents)

How to win in court (even when you are flat out GUILTY!) (For a lawyer)

Dream jobs that don't get advertised. (For an employment guide)

Confidential information that your (teacher, accountant, doctor, mechanic, etc.) is hiding from you.

Crafty tips pro's use to find the best real estate deals. (For a real estate agent)

Beauty secrets that super models pray you never find out. (For a cosmetics firm)

5 telltale signs your spouse is cheating on you. (For a marriage counseling service)

Jealously guarded carpet cleaning marketing secrets. (For a marketing package sold to carpet cleaners)

What your banker doesn't ever want you to find out. (For a financial advisor) See how that works? Making your information play upon something that appears to be a "secret", something that is of immense interest to your target audience, will draw traffic like crazy. This is a very powerful, powerful concept. Get this concept implemented in the title of your web page, and you'll have an almost insurmountable edge that most website owners will never understand how to overcome.

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Secret #2 The little known secret to getting better positioning than your competition even when they have the same identical keyword.

List your important keywords more than once on your site!

Some of the major search engines will rank your website based on the relevancy of the keywords used in the search engine. For example, if your site sells Ray Ban sunglasses and the words "Ray Ban" are keywords listed on your page, your site will come up when a user searches for "Ray Ban". And the same for a competitive website with the same sequence of keywords. However, if you list Ray Ban not once but several times throughout your page, your site is more "relevant" to the search for the user and usually will get better positioning than the site who has it listed less times than you.

Another keyword that I feel is the most important keyword is your business name. Many website owners often forget about this keyword. Think about this for a moment. Let's say you are new to the Internet and your provider allows you to search the Net using Alta Vista. You heard that AT&T had a website, but you don't have a clue about the URL. While at Alta Vista you could type the keyword "AT&T" and guess what you will find? That's right... AT&T's URL. Many of you have invested a great deal of money in your name and your contacts know you name so why not give them the opportunity to find you that way?

Many savvy web professionals list their relevant keywords as many times as they possibly can throughout their site because of this. You can also achieve this by listing your relevant keywords several times at the bottom of your web page, away from your main page, hidden and out of sight. Maybe you've seen this for yourself on other websites. It may take a little longer for your page to load, but the extra attention your site receives because of the higher search engine positioning should outweigh the couple of seconds of extra downloading that this causes.

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Secret #3 Another little known trick to get listed ahead of your competition

 Another thing that will help your listing come out ahead of your competition (even if you have the same exact keywords) is by beginning the "title" of your site with an "A" or a number. Some search engines will alphabetize (by web page title) "ties" on keyword listings. So a website titled "Amazing Beauty Tips" will have a better listing position than a website titled "Wendy's Cosmetic's Tips" when the same keyword is resident on both pages. Try to figure out a way to name your site starting with a number or "A" and that will give you a difficult to overcome (and hard to detect for the average website owner) competitive edge.

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Secret #4 Proven techniques for selecting the most effective keywords and how to arrange them.

Generally, the more specific you can be, the better. On the other hand, you don't want to use keywords that are too unique, because no one will ever think to look for them. Use keywords that someone who has never heard of you, but who would be interested in what you offer, is likely to search for.

Many Internet directories limit your description to around 25 words. So your description needs to be packed with appropriate keywords. The more keywords, and the more precisely they describe your Website, the more highly targeted traffic you're going to generate.

Your keywords are crucial, and you only get one chance with each search engine. Here's a very effective technique that uses brainstorming, distillation and competitive research to develop a powerful list of keywords.

Make a list of 50 words that describe your business. Just put down the first things that come to mind, until you have 50. Don't spend a lot of time worrying about how appropriate they are. Just do a little brainstorming with yourself and keep writing until you have 50.

Now, remove all the words that appear in the name of your site. (Your listing will include these anyway). Take the top 20 remaining keywords and prioritize them, with the most important first.

Now, get on-line and go to a major Internet search engine. Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com) is a good place to start, but it is a directory and therefore carries a limited amount of information. I would next try MetaCrawler (http://metacrawler.cs.washington.edu:8080/), which is a multisearch engine, then Lycos (http://www.lycos.com), Open Text (http://www.opentext.com:8080/), Hot Bot (http://www0.hotbot.com:5555/) and WebCrawler (http://webcrawler.com/WebCrawler/WebQuery.html) another multisearch engine. Try searching for each of the 20 words and keep track of how many listings you get for each one. Look at the listings you get back for each search, perhaps follow a few links, and see how the sites compare to your Website. This will give you a good idea of what your competitors are doing, and how they're listing their websites.

Next, start searching for combinations of keywords. Try combining the first two on your list. Try other combinations based on the numbers you got back for each individual word. Try each of your first few words combined with other words on your list. You'll probably discover some combinations that will give you more of an "exclusive" listing combinations that only return a few (or no) other listings. If you find certain combinations that (1) would likely be searched for by your prospects and (2) don't return very many other listings -- by all means make note of these. These are called "power combinations".

You may want to change the priority of your keywords based on what you find. So go ahead and re-prioritize your 20 top keywords.

Now, you'll need to create several versions of your description.

First, try and create a description using all 20 keywords. If you discovered any "power combinations" make sure that those words occur NEXT to each other in the description. Now, limit your description to 40 words total, using as many of your keywords as possible.

Next, create a description that's limited to 25 words. Use as many of your highest priority keywords as possible.

Finally, develop a 10-word description using your highest priority keywords.

You now have several versions of your site description. Keep these handy. It's a good idea to type them into a text file and have it available when going on-line to submit your listings. Then you can just cut and paste text into each Internet search engine's submission form. You'll want to do the same with the name of your site and your URL.

The reason you've developed several versions of your description is that different directories have different limits on the length of descriptions. Some permit unlimited descriptions, and others limit to just 15-25 words. Also, there are other places and methods on the Internet for you to promote your website, so some of your descriptions can be used in other ways, such as for classified advertising.

You can also use one of the descriptions you've developed on the top of your home page. Remember that the Internet search engines are out there looking for your page and you need a way to let them know how to describe it.

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Secret #5 A powerful way to get your listing seen by potential customers, even if they're not looking for you.

Here's where it pays to be creative. The trick is to get your listing displayed to the appropriate people, not necessarily in the appropriate categories. Because the majority of people use search engines by searching for particular terms (rather than clicking through the categories), it's important to devise keywords that will get your listing displayed to your potential customers when they search for subjects that interest them.

Let's illustrate this concept with an example. Suppose you're selling lakefront vacation homes. Your natural inclination would be to use keywords such as "lake", "lakefront", "real estate", "homes", "vacation", etc. And those will work, as long as your prospect goes on the Web with the intention of looking for lakefront real estate. But this strategy will miss a lot of very well qualified prospects -- people who are in the market for your product but don't think about looking for it on the Web.

What if instead of, or in addition to the "lakefront" and "real estate" keywords, you used words such as "fishing", "water skiing", "sailing", and "swimming" in your description? Do you see the difference? Yes, these keywords will put your listing in front of a lot of unqualified people, but it doesn't matter. What matters is, you'll catch those people who are interested in what you have but who would have never searched for it.

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Secret #6 A little-used way to get multiple listings for your site in the same search engine

What if you just can't distill your keywords down to 25? Or what if you want to appeal to several different audiences with different sets of keywords? Or what if you want to use the techniques described in Secret #2? Many search engines will not let you list the same site more than once or twice, particularly within the same category. So how do you get around this restriction?

It's easy. For each listing, use a different URL. Have several different versions of your "home page", each with their own URL and "site name."

Let's look again at our lakefront property. We'll call it "Another Site at Hidden Shores." You could create a page titled "A Fishing Site at Hidden Shores", another one titled "Another Skiing Site at Hidden Shores", "Another Sailing Site at Hidden Shores" and so on. Each of these pages will have it's own unique URL and name, and if you're not too obvious about it, you can get a separate listing from most search engines (complete with different keywords) for each page. This can dramatically increase your exposure. (HINT, HINT, did you notice I titled each page starting with the letter A?).

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Secret #7 Another powerful method to get prospects to "click through" to your site

Another method you can use to distinguish yourself from the rest is by appealing to your audience's curiosity. People surfing the web are curious by nature, and if you can arouse their curiosity, they'll take a look. Use words and phrases that tell enough to raise curiosity, but not enough to satisfy it. In our lakefront real estate example, you could have a listing like this: Amazing Hidden Shores - Are they really skiing in the nude?

Fishing, sailing, picture taking and swimming will never be the same! It is one wild time here at Hidden Shores... That would get all your keywords in there, plus it arouses curiosity and makes your listing stand out. Chances are, nobody else is going to have anything about skiing in the nude. And it's something that many people won't be able to resist.

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Secret #8 The top ten requested search terms

Here are the top ten requested search terms, as detailed in a May 1999 article from Wired Magazine:

1. sex
2. nude
3. pictures
4. adult
5. women
6. software
7. erotic
8. erotica
9. gay
10. naked

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Secret #9 How to create a "traffic funnel" that pumps traffic to your site

People don't go on the Web to be sold to, they go for information. Many surfers are reluctant to click on a site that they feel is just one big commercial. However, people are very willing to look at sites that they feel match their interests.

So, the trick is to create a lot of highly informative, non-promotional "mini-sites" that will appeal to your target market. They don't have to be extensive -- 2 or 3 pages will usually do. And on each page, you can have a link (preferably a "banner") to your commercial pages.

As seen in technique #3, you can submit a separate listing for each "mini-site" you create. And because these are non-promotional content sites, you have more options available to you in the categories that you're able to list under. You can use these "mini-sites" and their associated search engine listings to appeal to several different target markets, and then "funnel" all these visitors to your main promotional site. The possibilities are endless and very powerful.

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Secret #10 How to use the META tag to help gain best positioning in Alta Vista

One of the best and most popular search engines, Alta Vista (now powering Yahoo), depends on a software program to search through web pages and generate listings. Alta Vista will find your pages and index them on its own -- you don't get the opportunity to tell it about your site. Alta Vista indexes all the words in your document, and uses the first few words as a description of the page.

However, you can use an HTML tag, called the META tag, to specify how you want your page described and indexed. This tag is used when you create your web pages. Here's how it works.

The META tags needs to be included in the HEAD section of your page, between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags. On your page, include the following two META tag statements:

The first statement will specify the description that Alta Vista uses for your listing. The second statement will enable you to add keywords (which may not otherwise be present on the page) to the index. This is also a good opportunity to insert keyword combinations. We have also found that keywords work better without commas although I have no concrete evidence of this as of yet. May we suggest you create two (index.html & index2.html) to test this out on your own. Remember to keep close tabs on your hit results and let us know what you have found to be true.

**CAUTION** Some sites who index using the META tag will not use the keywords in your META reference if you duplicate them several times. I would recommend you not duplicate these keywords more than 5 times. I might also mention that some search engines also limit your description to 25 words or less so think before you create your META tags.

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Secret #11 Five things you should NEVER do

1) DON'T submit a listing before your page is up - your listing will almost certainly be rejected, and it will take you that much longer to get listed.

2) DON'T try to list in an inappropriate category - this will also cause your listing to be rejected. The categories are not that important, because most people don't use them to find listings. So don't jeopardize your chances of getting a listing by trying to get it in an inappropriate category.

3) DON'T have a confusing site name - your site name should briefly describe your site and what people will find there. If it's ambiguous no one will bother clicking on it.

4) DON'T use clever, made-up words. No one will know to search for them.

5) DON'T use the words "site", "Web", "Internet", "Website", or "Home page" in your listing. These words apply to ALL sites and are a waste of the limited space you have to describe the unique aspects of your site.

Other Ways to Promote Your Website

After submitting your website information to the search engines, there are a few more things you can do to promote your site. They include the following:

Announce on your ISP's Member Site List
Post to Topic Related Newsgroups
Press Releases
Submissions to Cool Page of The Day Type Websites
E-mail to VIPs
Special Interest Groups
Tell Everyone with whom you Communicate
Use all regular forms of Business Communications
Reciprocal Links
Links to these can all be found below.

Announce on your ISP's Member Site List

Most Internet Service Providers (ISP) provide a list of their members home pages. Some of these lists are rather simple. Others are broken down into business, personal, and other categories. This is free public relations and people do browse these lists. If for no other reason, to see their own listing. If you can add a description, by all means do so and spend as much care on it as you did in submitting to the search engines.

Post to Newsgroups

Post an announcement on all relevant usenet newsgroups. If your website has regional information, post in the general newsgroup for your region. If your site is oriented towards a special interest area like hobbies, sports, travel, or any other of about 18,000 subject areas, search the newsgroups (see below for links) for those where the readers would have an interest in your website. Review at least fifty of the headers in the newsgroups and read some of the articles to be sure it is an appropriate place to post your website announcement. If necessary, you should tailor your message for each specific newsgroup.

All of the above assumes your website is non-commercial. If your page is a commercial one, you should limit your postings only to newsgroups which are designated for commercial announcements. Remember, you are trying to build goodwill, not ill will. You might do this gradually, posting only one or two messages a day spaced a few days apart. If you start getting flames (irate e-mail messages) you'll know you are doing something wrong, and these messages will tell you exactly what that is. To avoid any problems you should read the charter for the newsgroups which describes its intended use. You can use the search engines to find much more detailed information on posting to newsgroups and the sins you should avoid. 

Press Releases

Press releases should target either general interest or special interest media. Your targets should include print, broadcast, and internet media. General interest media includes your local newspaper, Time magazine, and some of your local radio and television stations. Special interest media includes trade publications and broadcast media that focuses on some niche area of interest. The important thing to remember as you pursue this avenue, is that your press release must be newsworthy, i.e...., news, if it is going to be published and generate the traffic to your website that you are seeking. You should also recognize that what's news to one organization isn't necessarily news to another.

You could get on the radio. Does one of your local stations have a talk show that covers computers? Perhaps there's a local talk show that's about crafts and hobbies. Your website on model railroading might be an appropriate subject to talk about when you call into the show. Hey, you're doing a public service here. Don't be shy.

Submissions to Cool Page of The Day/Week/Month Websites

If you can get your website listed as Cool Site of the Day or be designated a Point Review Top 5% of the Net, you may have to start worrying about the bandwidth policy of your ISP. Some of this recognition has been known to load down a server, at least for a few days, if not for the long term. If you are not familiar with these web awards take a look at our header titled, Site of the Day/Week/Month (link listed below). This type of special recognition not only will generate traffic to your website, but it also makes you feel really, really good. There's not a lot of high pay out there for building an excellent website, so its a great reward to get some well deserved recognition from your peers for your efforts.