Web Design Tip of the Month

By Phil & Janet Winter
Posted Tuesday, January 4, 2005

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We hope the new year brings you prosperity and happiness, and lots of hits to your web site! Since this is the first Web Tip of the Month for 2005, we thought we'd give you two-for-the-price-of-one. Also, we've changed the format of your Web Tip of the Month. Let us know how you like it! Our topics for this month are:

Bid Ranked Search Engines
Keywords

What in the heck are bid-ranked search engines?
First a little background. Most search engines are what's known as relevancy search engines. That is, you type in a search phrase, and the search engine tries to come up with relevant results. The other type is bid-ranked, sometimes call pay-per-click search engines. These search engines are of particular interest to those selling on line.

Have you ever noticed the sponsored sites on the top and right side of each Yahoo results page? Would you like to have your site appear there? You bet! And it may be easier than you think. Those sponsored sites don't come from Yahoo directly. They come from Overture.com, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yahoo, and probably the best-known bid-ranked search engine.

How do they work? Let's say you sell the ubiquitous business school item - widgets. You go on a bid-ranked search engine, type in "widgets," and it tells you the current bid price to have your site appear at any position (rank) in the search results. For example, "widgets" might have a bid price of $5.00 per click for the top rank. At rank 30, the bid price might be only $.50. But the top rank price for "translucent widgets" might only be $.10! If you bid and get widgets at rank 30, you'll pay $.50 every time someone clicks to your site.

To make bid-ranked search engines work for you, you need to know two things. First is your "conversion rate." Out of every 100 visitors to you site, how many actually buy? Secondly, how much is a click worth to you, based on your average gross margin?

Pay-per-click search engines are not for everyone, but they can be a powerful tool (who wouldn't want to appear at the top on Yahoo's first page?) - IF you use the right strategy.

Keywords
We've offered other tips on this topic before, but it's so important it can't hurt to go into more detail. We apologize if this gets a bit technical.

Again, assume you are selling widgets. Obviously one of your keywords will be widgets. And since you specialize in flash-frozen widgets, you'll use that one too. But the important question is, what do my customers search for? Fortunately, there are a couple of ways you can find out.

If your site has been up for several months, it will have accumulated usage statistics. All the major hosting sites provide information on what your visitors actually used as a search word or phrase to get to your site.

Secondly, you can use a reverse search engine. You type in you keyword(s), and the reverse search engine tells you how many people have searched on those words. The reverse search engine is generally a subscription service available through Overture.com and others.

Keywords are not an exact science. Different search engines handle keywords in different ways. But if you have Google and Yahoo covered, you've taken care of about 95% of the searches on the web. Also, your keywords should be consistent in your site's title, meta-tags, meta-description (your webmaster will know what these are), and your page text.

If you are interested in these topics, we'd love to discuss them with you!

Have a happy New Year!