Site Visibility - Web Site Traffic...need we say more?
An Internet site needs to be promoted, and promotion needs to be maintained, if your site's visibility on the Internet is to be maintained. Doing a one time submission to the search engines is NOT enough. Instead of considering this another cost in your budget, consider this an investment in the life blood of your company! We offer all of the promotion services that you might need to properly market your site - SEO, Monthly Submissions, paid search engines, free search engines, Pay-Per-Click advertising, etc.

How People come to Internet Sites (web site traffic)
-Most will find you on the Internet (e.g.. from a link on another site, by searching a subject on a search engine or perhaps finding your site listed in a directory or other type of listing).
-Many will see your URL (i.e.. web site address) printed on an advertisement, card, or brochure.
-Some people may be referred to your site by word of mouth.
-A few others may read about your site in an article somewhere or hear about you on TV or radio.

The MOST popular method by which people find sites - Studies have continued to show that the most effective, easy and reliable method for a person to find your web site is on the INTERNET! Unless you have a bricks and motor location also, TV and RADIO advertising will do next to nothing to drive traffic to your site. Who can remember those long domain names but the you get home...even if you had the time and energy to do it before it leaves your short term memory? Print advertising traffic referral can have some effect because the URL is permanent on a piece of paper that they can read again later...not having to try to memorize and remember your domain name from a 30 second radio ad. At least they can take the printed material home with them from the Dr's office, work, or a bulletin board where you posted a card or flyer. But then they still have to remember to take that final step and boot up their computer and find your website...and gees, you have to hope they type it in right...if your domain name is at all hard to spell, then, well, you have trouble. People won't try twice to type something...first they don't realize it was their typing error that caused them to not find your site, and secondly we live in the day and age of instant gratification. So if you cannot primarily be found on the Internet where they can click a link without having to do any typing then you have cut off your primary source of traffic.


The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - There are rules to search engine optimization and submissions. You can find sites out there as we speak, that are flagrantly abusing or disobeying those rules on their websites. Using lines and line of keywords at the bottom of your site is one such abuse, especially if the text used is the same color as the background. Naughty, Naughty! Doing that is called spamming the search engines, that is trying to get a better ranking than someone else by abuse. Trying to get a better ranking by actually making your web site better, is okay. Trying to get a higher ranking by just adding nonsense to your site, will work for a short time, but once the Search Engines catch you...well let us say...this is where it gets ugly. You can get banned from the Search Engines, all of them...they talk to each other. And once banned, you will never get back on. Now that is serious stuff!! Here is a fun list of things that people do to spam the search engines. BEWARE - Site owners will often do this, but worse than that is that there are many "search engine optimization and submission" companies that also do this to their innocent clients! Be very careful and check up on the company and their rules and tactics before you sign up with any such service...and remember you get what you pay for! Any company that says that it will submit your site to ALL of the search engines for $39 one time fee is lying. Not all of the search engines are even free to submit to...Yahoo is several hundred dollars per year.

Rules For Search Engine Optimization and Submissions - You can find a lot of them here at www.searchenginewatch.com

Here are some of the topics they cover on Search Engine Optimization:

A Webmaster's Guide To Search Engines
Open Directory: Search Engine Submitting and Positioning
Submit It: Tips For Announcing Web Sites To Search Engines
webreference Search Engine Tutorial
Web Ranking Tools

Here are some of the topics they cover on Search Engine Submission Tips:

Essentials of Search Engine Submission
1. Intro To Search Engine Submission
2. Your Search Engine Submission Budget
3. Submitting To Directories: Yahoo & The Open Directory
4. Submitting To Crawlers: Google, Yahoo, Ask/Teoma & Microsoft's MSN
5. Submitting Via Paid Listings: Overture & Google AdWords

Optimizing for Crawlers
1. Intro to Search Engine Optimization
2. How Search Engines Work
3. How Search Engines Rank Web Pages
4. Search Engine Placement Tips
5. How To Use HTML Meta Tags

Optional but Helpful
* Major Search Engines and Directories
* Search Engine Results Chart
* Who Powers Whom? Search Providers Chart
* Buying Your Way In: Search Engine Advertising Chart
* Checking Your Listing In Search Engines
* Measuring Link Popularity
* Search Engines and Frames
* What Are Doorway Pages?
* Search Engine Features For Webmasters
* How Major Search Engines Regionalize
* Search Engines And Capitalization
* Search Engine Optimization
* SpiderSpotting: When A Search Engine, Robot Or Crawler Visits

Testimonial - "The CHICKS are very knowledgeable and know what method and format will benefit your business well. Even more impressive, The CHICKS web site designs are in compliance with the Search Engines and they will gear your site to be Search Engine Friendly without having to sacrifice the look and feel. Our site is also extremely user friendly. You see, it is the unique mixture of both that promotes a good successful web business. Getting it right the first time with the right web person will save you a lot of time, money and aggravation. If you want experts, choose The CHICKS. We learned the hard way after many past failed websites. Now our business is much better off."   www.vividjewelry.com

Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Submission Services - If you read any of the articles on the website mentioned above, you will quickly realize that it is a whole other job, just to optimize (get your site tagged and following the rules) your site, let alone following all the rules to get and keep your site on the Search Engines, let alone getting a high ranking on each of them!

When you hire us to optimize your site and do monthly submissions, that means you don't have to go research and learn that vast knowledge base, we keep on top of of all the changes (and there are some weekly at times) and do that for you.

Meta Tags - In addition to the TITLE tag, META tags inserted within <HEAD> and </HEAD> container are designed to embed document-specific meta-information. Such information may be accessed/extracted by servers/browsers for an indexing purpose, and can be used to control how your webpages are handled by the browser. Bottomeline is that if you want your HTML pages indexed and keyword searchable by popular search engines, i.e., yahoo, google, altavista, etc., you do need to add critical META tags in your HTML pages. Else, basically you're playing all by yourself (got a site but no traffic) and will start wondering why all these peoples in the net don't come to your fabulous site. :-) If you would like to see ours...look at the top of this browser that you are using to view our site and click on the word "View", and then "Page Source" or "Source" and look at the 15 lines of meta tags.

If you have any questions about your site and the search engines, please email us!