by David Gikandi

There is a pervasive myth among web site managers that simply submitting your web site to hundreds of search engines will increase traffic to your site. Another myth is that simply inserting META tags in your Web pages will also increase your traffic. Both are just not true. So what works? Search engine positioning - that is by far your best and most affordable bet.

Consider these statistics: Over 95% of Web users find what they are looking for by visiting the top 6 search engines. Yahoo alone handled over 55 million searches and page views in December 1997. Many of these searches are for the products and services that you deal in, guaranteed! Everybody knows that even a few good positions on even one or two important keywords or phrases can drive thousands or hundreds of thousands of quality visitor traffic to a Web site per day. Research has shown that people hardly ever go past the top 30 search results for any one search. The top 10 results receive 78% more traffic than those in position 11 to 30 do. The top 30 results get over 90% of the search traffic. This alone explains why some sites do so well and others so disappointingly, and why it is so critical to be ranked highly.

So how do you position your web site at the top of search engine results? Use information frame pages. Information frame pages, also known as entry or bridge pages, are Web pages designed specifically to rank highly on the unique ranking algorithms of each search engine. The two best things about using information frame pages is that they cost far less than other promotional tools such as banner ads, and they work better when properly designed. There are two ways to go about creating information frames. You can either do it yourself or have someone do it for you.

If you decide to do it yourself, be prepared to invest a considerable amount of time on them - beating the search engine algorithms is not an easy matter! You should also be prepared to make a number of information frame pages. You must make one information frame page per keyword or keyword phrase that you want to be positioned well in. For best results, depending on your site's subject matter, you should target 10 to 50 keywords and keyword phrases. Usually, a page that ranks well on one engine may not rank well on other engines. Assuming that you want to make sure that you are ranked highly on the five top engines (AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite - Yahoo does not accept information frame pages), you have to make five versions of each information frame page, each optimized for a particular engine.

Knowing what it takes to make effective information frame pages is not hard - there are lots of good publications that now tell you exactly what the search engines are looking for in a page that will rank highly. One of the best guides to this is "Secrets to Achieving a Top 10 Position", a free 118 page manual that comes free with WebPosition software (see www.positionweaver.com for details). The hard part is in actually creating these information frames! Basically, this is what it would involve:

First, you have to realize that ranking criteria varies from search engine to search engine. Most evaluate the placement of keywords or keyword phrases on various parts of your pages based simultaneously on all these criteria:

1. Prominence of the keyword searched - how early in a page a keyword appears.
2. Frequency of the keyword searched - number of times the keyword appears. Be careful about this. Simply repeating the keyword will not work because grammatical structure and keyword weight also plays a role.
3. Site Popularity - a few search engines consider how popular your site is when ranking.
4. "Weight" of the keywords - that is the ratio of keywords to all other words. Each search engine has a threshold. If your page crosses that threshold, the engine labels it as spam and ignores it.
5. Proximity of keywords - how close together the keywords are to each other, especially when the item searched for is a phrase.
6. Keyword Placement - these are the locations where an engine will look for the keyword, e.g. in the body, title, META tags, etc.
7. Grammatical structure - some engines consider grammar in their calculations. They do this to make it harder for spammers to do their thing.
8. Synonyms - some engines look for words similar in meaning to the keyword.

As you can see, the ranking criteria is highly dynamic, using a complex algorithm that integrates all the above factors in various proportions and with various maximum and minimum values. An important criteria to look deeper into is the keyword placement criteria. These are the various places that engines look for keywords:

• Keywords in the <TITLE> tag(s)
• Keywords in the <META NAME="DESCRIPTION">
• Keywords in the <META NAME="KEYWORD">
• Keywords in <H1> or other headline tags
• Keywords in the <A HREF="http://yourcompany.com/page.htm"></A> link tags
• Keywords in the body copy
• Keywords in ALT tags
• Keywords in <!-- insert comments here> comments tags
• Keywords contained in the <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="HIDDEN" VALUE="include list of keywords here"> the hidden type tag.
• Keywords contained in the URL or site address, e.g., http://www.keyword.com/keyword.htm

To fully cover the process of figuring out the parameters of each criteria for each search engine is beyond the scope of this article. If you would really like to get into the details of this, see the free "Secrets to Achieving a Top 10 Position" 118 page manual from WebPosition (see www.positionweaver.com for details). Put simply, there are several ways to come up with information frame pages, depending on the resources at your disposal. What you would need to do if you were doing this manually would be to do a search on a keyword or phrase in a search engine. See what page ranks highest for that keyword. Make sure that the actual page is the same one displayed in the search results and not a redirected page. Then meticulously inspect that page and create a information frame page that beats that page on all the above criteria, without going too far as to cross the engine's thresholds. You would, for example, make sure that your keyword or phrase appears in all the places that it does in the page you are studying, and it does so just a little more often, and in a weight just a fraction of a percentage point higher. Another thing to keep in mind is that most search engines seems to favor shorter pages, meaning that you should try to achieve the above with a page that is slightly shorter than the current top ranking one.

If you want to save yourself all this hassle and get your pages done by someone else, just find a reputable positioning company or consultant. Currently, there isn't that many, so the fees charged for this service can vary widely, so can the service and results. There are three types of places you could go to. You could go to a consultant - expect to pay up to $3000 for that! Or you could use one of the online services such as Did It or Green Flash. Did It charges $299 for set up for 4 keywords or phrases, plus $0.25 per hit on the information frame page. Green Flash has no set up fees, rather a minimum order size, plus $0.25 to $2.00 per hit on the information frame page. For a lot of webmasters, that is too high a price to pay, considering that 1000 visitors could end up costing you up to $2,000. Our service uses a different approach to make it more affordable. The PositionWeaver.com web site (www.positionweaver.com) features an online Automatic Information frames Generator, plus other tools, software, information, and resources useful in search engine positioning. Developed through reverse-engineering many search results, this system instantly creates optimized, professional information frames for Web site promoters. The service costs $34.95 per year for unlimited information frames and keywords.

If you want to learn more about information frames, visit www.positionweaver.com.