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Search Engines The Great and Powerful

Search Engines are the absolute most common way to find anything and
everything in, on, or near the planet. Become a pro on the engines and you can
retire to Bali and live with beautiful naked women in a mud hut. In a perfect
world this would be an easy feat!

What is a search engine?

What!?! Do you live under a rock? You know perfectly well what a search
engine is! Search engines are gigantic database driven sites that store
everything mankind knows. If it exists on the 'Net, it can be reached by search
engine. Oddly enough, while Search Engines collect all the known data in the
universe they are (needless to say) rather difficult to use and get valid
results from. If you know what you're looking for - and I mean really know, then
you just might find it. If you're just poking around, then you're very likely to
find everything you weren't looking for - as well as a boatload of porn. It's
the great Mystery of search engines - it's there IF you can figure out how to
get to it.

What is Search Engine Traffic like?

Engines can take bad traffic and make it worthwhile. You can take a totally
useless surfer who does nothing more than run your bandwidth bill through the
roof, and dump them off on an engine. Mainstream traffic can be wickedly
productive coming off the engines. Surfers can do detailed searches for whatever
it is that flips their switch on engines. Sooner or later, they will sign up for
something. The surfer just decided they where going to buy a new top of the line
hammer and if you sell brand new top of the line hammers you may just bag them
right off the bat. The same goes for porn but to a lesser extent. Engines have
changed over the years and you might have to pay a pretty penny for that top
spot on a keyword like 'blowjob'. You're still going to convert like a bandit
when you send them to a site full of blowjobs but you're probably going to be
paying the engine half of what you make.

Who should use a search engine?

One and all! Come line up -- regardless of what your site is, or what your
page is, it should be listed in the engines. Submit every freaking thing you
ever built to every engine you can find, because search engines are dice you
can't afford not to role. As the ultimate work-horse, the meat and potatoes of
traffic, you can make a killing with a well ranked page on the right engine. But
if you want serious traffic volumes then grab your checkbook and get ready to
spend some money because the engines have discovered how profitable their
traffic is.

Gone are the old days when you could "build it and they would come".

Demystifying the Search Engine:

You want to have the highest volume widget site in the world? You sell
widgets at a fair rate and your widgets are better than everyone else's widgets
right? This article couldn't possibly give you all your widget promotion options
but we can touch on some.

Free Listings and Paid Listings:

Some of the engines are full-time, all the time, pay engines like Overture.
You can't get listed on Overture unless you cough up the bucks. Oh, and you will
pay every time someone clicks on the keywords you have selected. You can't
haggle over the price because your bidding on the 'words' so bid wisely.

Overture will keep track of the clicks and you really aren't in any position to
dispute their numbers. I'm not suggesting that those numbers wouldn't be
accurate only that you're paying and you're doing it on their terms. If you
don't like their stats your only option is to stop buying from them. Some of the
engines are a mix of free listings and paid listings. Obviously the paid
listings appear before the free listings so again, you pay - you get traffic.
You are always free to submit your pages for free but don't expect to get the
prime real estate because that is reserved for the paying customers.

The last of the dying breed is the free submission engines. They sell
advertising but it's in the form of a banner not a look-alike listing. Engines
like this don't command the same level of traffic that the mixed engines do. If
they did they would be charging for those listings too.

Engine Evolution:

The best days of search engine traffic have passed now that the engines have
discovered that people will pay to be listed. Not to say you can't get traffic
without paying its just not as easy as it once was.

People say the hey-day for Internet porn has passed because it is so much harder
to get traffic than it used to be. You built up either real sites or just spider
friendly sites and got your traffic without much work. Many modern day Internet
porn kings started out getting their traffic primarily from the search engines.

The evolution of the engines has made it harder for the little non-commercial
websites to survive. If you are operating a hobby site or maybe your just poor
and you want to see your work in a place people can find it… How are you
supposed to get traffic to your site if you don't have any money to spend?

Pay for it? Oh, Hell No!

If you can't swallow the idea of paying for search engine traffic then you
need to make plans to bury yourself in the trenches and learn the engines. It
can be a full-time job figuring out what works and what doesn't. Each individual
engine makes their own rules - and they change on a regular basis, but it is
still possible to master the engines.

Head over to

http://www.searchenginewatch.com and get familiar. This is a nice old site
with lots of good information on how the engines work, and how they rattle all
of us with their changes. It is probably the best place to start learning what
makes the engines tick. No better time to learn than now - so buckle up and get
to work!

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By Jo Hawke - AEBN publicity@aebn.net