Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

Over the last few weeks I've been wandering around looking at the question of traffic. In fact, if you're new to my columns here at Rated Hot, I should tell you that you will often see me talking about traffic. I make no apologies for that because getting traffic to our sites is half the battle in making sales.

Of course we all know that one way to get traffic to our sites and galleries is to submit them to the link lists and TGPs. At the same time we know that the traffic we get from those two sources is not the best quality traffic around. All too often what you're getting to your sites are people who want freebies. They're never going to buy no matter how hard you try and sell your sponsor.

We also know that the best traffic around is what you can glean from the search engines. A bigger percentage of search engine traffic will actually buy what you're trying to sell than the link list and TGP traffic that might hit your sites. But actually getting listed in a reasonable spot in the search engine results pages for the terms you are targeting is not easy.

And that raises an interesting question. Will a site that you've designed for link list traffic also rank well in the search engines?

There certainly was a time when it would. In fact Steve and I can remember times when some of our very content-poor, text-based full page ads ranked at the top of major search terms but that doesn't seem to be the case any more.

There are obviously a number of factors that now affect the ranking of those text-based full page ads and some of those factors undoubtedly have some impact on the way our free sites and galleries are also ranked. So let's look at one of the factors that could well have a major affect on our sites.

Stop and think for a moment about the average free site. The ratio of text to graphics is not going to be very high. The way the text is generally set out on each of the pages in a free site is usually fairly limited with some high-impact text around some banners together with a paragraph or two of text that is generally over-stuffed with keywords and keyword-phrases.

Now how would a search engine spider view your free site pages if it was programmed to look for text that was littered with keywords?

Of course it would find all the text that you had and it might even decide that your site was important because of that text and the keywords and keyword phrases that you had included. But what if the spider was programmed to see the way you had your text set out as typical of a spam site?

And that raises another question that you should be immediately thinking about. Are search engine spiders now looking for site text that is set out quite differently to the way our free site text is set out?

I know that some of you are instantly thinking that I'm a ditzy blonde who has no clue. I mean how could I have a clue when I'm talking about text and everyone else is talking about links as the key to good search engine ranking?

I don't blame you for thinking that way because so many people are still thinking about links and page rank as being of the utmost important. The major search engine forums are repeating that information like a cracked record so it's hard not to accept it. But there are some search engine experts who are beginning to suggest that it's not all about links and page rank.

There are some who are suggesting that, for some time now, it's all been about text and the way it is set out on your web page. Some go so far as to suggest that you need to go to the extent of including plenty of relevant text - complete with headings and sub-headings - to really impress the search engine spiders.

It's way to involved to go deep into it here but if you are in any doubt about the ability of search engines to detect spam by analyzing the text on a web page do a search on Google for a paper entitled 'Phrase Based Information Retrieval and Spam Detection'. If you take the time to read it you might see web page text in a whole new light.

So, getting back to our original question about whether or not the average free site will rank well in the search engines I have to suggest that it won't.

If you really want to grab a piece of search engine traffic for your free sites then you're going to have to give the search engines what they want. And what the search engines want is nothing like what the average free site looks like.