Just because you’ve built a site, they will NOT necessarily come.  With millions of new sites going live each day, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain the coveted top 10 placements on the search engines.  There are some ways to improve your chances of placement but, there are NO GUARANTEES.  Any company that has contacted you saying that they can guarantee placement should be reported to the Better Business Bureau.  The problem with guaranteeing placement is that you are, in essence, claiming that you can overcome the human element (directories are cataloged by humans). 

Most search engines use algorithm-based “spiders” to catalog their sites.  Once every month or so, depending on the site, the portals send out little robots that scan the first page of code looking for specific requirements that are pre-determined by the site to decide who gets listed first when a user types in a certain keyword. However, some search engines are technically known as “directories”.  Directories, like Yahoo!, don’t send out spiders. Instead, they actually catalog their sites using humans. So, if “Joe” over at Yahoo!, who is in charge of cataloging real estate sites, doesn’t like the color blue, he can decide to keep you out of the top 10 rankings because your site has too much blue.  There are ways to get past this and the other problems with search engine ranking.

To begin, you should make sure that your site is coded at the optimum level for the major engines.  We spend time each month researching the details of what the engines are looking for (keywords, META and ALT tags, etc.) including the ever-changing allowances for repeated words (to a certain extent) in a description of your site, and any other nuances that have been deemed important to the engines that month.

We have developed a package that incorporates a blanket of services that have proven effective in the past, and will give your site a jump on the competition as far as placement is concerned.  The efforts are made using the most recent research, and best coding possible. 

The site optimization package includes:

• Site Analysis: Adfecta will evaluate site navigation, coding and functionality to determine optimization strategy
• Search Engine Ranking Report
  (shows results of 5 keywords in top search engines)
• Competitor Analysis: Adfecta will research your competitors that are being placed higher in the engines than you are, based on the keywords that we find significant to your site. This report will help determine what seems to be working for others and includes code suggestions.
• Site Optimization: We will assist in creating a list of up to 25 suggested keyword phrases for client approval based on competitor analysis (information will be embedded into up to 10 of the site's top-level HTML pages)
• Search Engine Submission: Hand submission of Optimized and Doorway pages to top engines. 
• Strategic Link Campaign (up to 15 hours of relevant and industry site research and personal requests for free site review/link; additional inbound links help with search engine positioning efforts)

It should be noted that buying advertising on the top twelve portals could also help with search engine placement.  If you are spending money advertising on AOL, for instance, and you complain that you are not ranked on their site search returns, then threaten to pull your ad, thus denying them valuable income, they are more apt to “push” your site to the top of the list.  That being said, it is strongly recommended that some online advertising efforts be considered.