Lesson #51 The Expanding Search Engine!
Written By Cyndalie

The search engine marketplace has become a fierce battle ground with companies reducing the number of ways webmasters can get their sites indexed for free. In the past, the primary ways to get listed included submitting your site via a free URL submit form, paying for inclusion, and paying per click either by keyword bidding or contextual advertising.

Now, with Yahoo and Google being the only primary engines to which you can submit for free, the webmaster arsenal is shrinking. This has orced webmasters to find alternative ways for getting included by means such as creating linking strategies with sites that are already listed an indexed with the hope of your URL getting spidered and therefore indexed for free. Another way has been to pay for inclusion for one year and hope you remain in the index there after (some sites indexed before the PPI program started were "grandfathered in" while others have found to be less likely to be filtered out after their PPI term had expired). Yet another is to begin a PPC campaign, cancel it, and hope that your URL remains in the index with the status of being once a customer (shown to help Google rankings and speed up first time inclusion and indexing).

But as we have seen in 2003 and 2004, the search engine marketplace regarding the number of engines that drive large amounts of traffic has actually compressed. Options are limiting. But there are new trends and options developing for search engine marketers. As these primary search companies vie for prominence, they are continuously developing more and more ways to attract surfers by pushing new technologies for search beyond textually listed results.

Here is a brief overview of developing options marketers can begin to plan for and some suggestions on how to keep these alternative ranking goals in mind when doing traditional optimization tasks.

Google, known to be a leader in pushing the envelope in creating new search options, was one of the first to introduce image search to the mainstream market. Unlike PixLogic which claims to be the first to create the technology that finally succeeds at mimicking human sight, Google's image search option works by locating images based on the keywords, or text, used around the image (html, including alt tags), in the file name, or directory structure. An example to see how this works can be easily seen. Simply go to Google, click Images, make sure your "Safe Search" is on off, and type in the word "boobs". Take a look at the pages of some of the image results. An image from this page came up for me for this example http://www.xlgirls.net/big-boobs/. As you can see the word "boobs" appears around the images (above and below), in the image alt tags, the directory the images is in (twice). Google's Image search is a great tool for surfers looking for images but who do not want to fight through standard search results and popup windows. Webmasters can batch rename photos using Photoshop 7 and follow standard optimization recommendations to increase their chances of coming up in the image search, which then, will direct surfers to your sites. The same goes for most other image and multimedia search engines. However, almost all have a filter so check it off before testing the waters.

A9.com is another engine attempting to push the bar. An Amazon Company, it's evident that A9 relies on both Alexa, and in turn Google to power search results, however A9 then adds its own flavor of search experience on top. Designed to provide results for the web (Google), "Search Inside the Book®" powered by scanned in pages by Amazon now being picked up by Google whom will be expanding to include fully scanned books, Images (Google), Movies from the Internet Movie Database, Reference materials from data collection points like encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc.

The nice thing about A9.com is when you search you can get all this in one joint results page. The engine works to act at high level of personalization ­ almost like a browser you can use from any computter ­ and remembers your history, favorites, etc. For this reason you must sign in to turn off the family filter. Therefore, although this engine has come a long way based on great partnerships, for adult webmasters there really isn't much more you can do to increase your results for this engine alone that you should not already be doing for Google. It's easy to see why the more you focus on optimizing for Google, even as a singular engine, it can help your efforts across the board. For adult webmasters, it would be excellent to see an adult-friendly search engine of this caliber, as the privacy and retention for adult surfers could be tremendous.

Yahoo is also getting more personal and has enhanced its My Yahoo service with personalization features including search history, the ability to save pages to a "personal web" and block URLs from appearing in search results. According to an article dated Oct 5, 2004 in Search Engine Watch "Search results with My Yahoo Search resemble standard web search results, with additional options added to each individual listing. These options are "Save," "Save with Note," "Share" and "Block Site." Clicking "save" saves the search result to your personal collection of web pages. At this point, only the result is saved, not the full text of the underlying web page."

Sound good? I didn't think so either. Failure to fully cache and index saved pages in your personal profile can limit your own personal search results, as well as hinder positive results for sites that are updated daily. There are a many more Yahoo! personalized search options; many are similar to those I've described above about A9.

In other news, Looksmart has attempted to jump into search personalization as well and purchased a Furl. Google and Yahoo are going head to head to match up their Local search results listings which can help local offline businesses such as restaurants and attractions pull more business from the web. And MSN is finally waking up with a new line of products including an entire new search engine (MSNBot has been busy doing something). You can preview the new search technology here. Also lined up is an Email search tool called Lookout for use with Outlook, Newsbot, and more. You can see MSN's development preview page featuring all products at http://sandbox.msn.com.

It is easy to see why many adult webmasters aren't quite sure just how much importance to place on search engine optimization. Although there are not too many places left to submit to for free, there are expanding technologies designed to expand the results and performance of the pages and files you DO optimize. Now, with photo optimization coming to light, not only are many of the same standard SEO lessons again need to be reinforced, it's easy to see why many sites that have properly optimized the first time still maintain their performance today. It's time to take a look at your site in a new light. Put those bookmark links on your main index and member's area pages. Make every page uniquely optimized, name everything a keyword and always write copy with keywords in mind. (Optimize those TGP pages!) And most importantly, keep it consistent!