A high ranking in free search engines and directories is one of the simplest and most affordable ways of promoting your website. The reasons for getting your site well ranked on search engines are pretty clear.

Searching the Internet is the second most popular online activity after e-mail. These engines drive extremely targeted traffic your way. The visitor who finds your site with an online search is looking for exactly what you’re offering.

As a result of their popularity, sites like Google are now indexing billions of pages. Although South Africa’s own Ananzi and Aardvark search engines aren’t quite as big they’re also listing more sites by the day. While this is a good thing, it also means that the competition for high rankings is fierce.

Adding to this problem is that not many people go further than the third page of search engine results when looking for information. Therefore good rankings are vital if you want to take advantage of the potential traffic from search engines.

Some search engines are beginning to place more emphasis on paid submission and advertising. Other major search engines (like Google) will list your site for free. Even engines that require payment take elements like meta tags and relevant content into account when ranking a page.

Also considered is “link popularity”, which refers to how popular the search engine thinks your site is.

Some people will claim that the more search engines you submit your site to, the more traffic you’ll receive. This isn’t true, and by far the greatest amount of traffic to your site will come from just a few quality search engines and directories.

Some popular search engines include: Yahoo!, Google, MSN, Meta Crawler, AskJeeves, Altavista, Ask.com, Hotbot, Excite!, Ananzi, Aardvark.

Contact us for a free assessment of your search engine marketing requirements.