I hope you enjoy this month's topic. We had a lot of requests for how to do an email newsletter, so here you go. This is your newsletter, so if you like or don't like something about it, please email us at newsletter@bullmoosemarketing.com and we will adapt. Like everything on the Web, we too at Bull Moose Marketing need to be flexible...

Thanks for reading,
Nick Ellinger
CEO, Bull Moose Marketing, LLC.


In this issue...

Best Practices: Getting Listed on Search Engines on $20 a Month

After you have optimized your site for search engines per our September newsletter, you then need to get them listed. There are a few ways to do it free of charge and a few inexpensive ones:

Directories: The big Web directories that count in the search engine world are DMOZ and Zeal (and Yahoo!, but it is generally slow, unreliable, and costly). Both are edited by actual human beings (we here at BMM are editors on a number of categories -- see below for details of one lister of sites), which makes them usually easier to get listed on. You can just go to these sites and request that your site be listed (after reading a little about the editing guidelines). Zeal only allows free listings for informational materials, so make sure that your Web site has some purely informational material.

However, we recommend you endeavor to not just list your site, but also to edit the category to which your site belongs. This will help you keep track of your competition and make sure that you get any new additions to your site in the engine as well. Both sites have minimum requirements for editing, but one should be able to learn enough to pass these in about one hour.

The Usual Suspects: Most of the major search engines -- Altavista, Excite, Lycos, Hotbot, etc. -- have sections wherein a person can list their site free of charge. However, as these sites also have express listings where you pay $200 or so for guaranteed listings, they try to make the submit links difficult to find. This is when control-F (or open-apple-F for Mac users) is helpful. Simply find the word "submit" and/or "site" on the front page and you should be able to find the pages.

The big exception is Google. The way to get listed here is to search for your site. If it is there, you're done (you would think we could skip this step, but we like to demonstrate our firm grasp of the obvious). If if doesn't show up, click on "Help us improve" at the bottom of the page. Put your URL at the bottom of the page and submit it. Do it several times a month from different computers and eventually your site will be listed. This goes for all of the engines -- it takes time to get listed.

Paying for Listings: The best way to do this is through Overture. Take that list of keywords you generated two months ago and feed it into this engine with the amount you are willing to pay if someone wants to come to your site using that keyword. It will take $50 to open the account, but you need only spend $20/month. You can also use Overture's tool to suggest additional keywords.

Do you have any hints for our readers? Any questions, comments, or death threats? Please send them to newsletter@bullmoosemarketing.com.


Bull Moose Rant: Don't Just Promote Your Own Site

In order to get the best placement for our clients' Web sites, our staff here at BMM are editors on several search engines (these human-edited directories like DMOZ - The Open Directory Project and Zeal feed into a number of other search engine sites. This means we get to see many of the Web site submissions that are going on on the Web.

We saw a series of submissions the other day that made us want to rant (not because they were part of a bad idea, but because they were part of a great idea that no-one is doing). There were about thirty submissions from one person that were all news articles about what their company was doing right.

The submitter was obviously a partisan hoping to make sure that these stories were seen by people seeking out news. The thing that struck us is how few people are doing this. Businesses get so focused on their own site (and rightly so) that they forget that they also want Web users to visit other materials supporting them or casting doubts on their competition. These stories can be a great boon to your campaign and even more so that they are not associated with your site--they have increased value because of their independence.

So what can you do to help promote other people's Web sites?
  • Put them in the directory sites. You can very easily get editing privileges on both DMOZ and Zeal. Then, fill the directory you edit with favorable stories to your cause/candidate. (Or, hire us to do it.)
  • Link to them and get your allies to link to them (you are already linked to your allies, right?). A big part of search engine listings is link popularity--how many times a site is linked to is a good indicator of how important a site is. You can boost their listings by increasing their popularity. This also has the effect of making these sites more accessible even if the user doesn't use a search engine.
  • Submit them to search engines. While this is not as certain and has to be done well in advance, using the basic submit tools on engines like Altavista, Lycos, Excite, MSN, and AOL can help these articles achieve strong placement.
Not only does this help tell new people about you, but also seeing a news story (with no perceived influence from your campaign) about why your company is better lends credibility to esteem to people who already support you the same way people look for ads for the car they just bought. People want to be validated and there are rewards aplenty in validating them.

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While Bull Moose Marketing and its agents used their best efforts in collecting and preparing the information published herein, Bull Moose Marketing does not assume, and hereby disclaims, any liability for any loss or damage caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions resulted from negligence, accident or other causes.

© 2002 Bull Moose Marketing, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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Source: 2002 Bull Moose Marketing; www.bullmoosemarketing.com/business