Search

At Net Maintain our policy is to design our sites to be as search engine friendly as possible. This means trying to include many of the "desirable" qualities looked for by search engines while at the same time trying to avoid as many of the "undesirable" qualities as possible.

Desirable Qualities

• A concise site hierarchy and navigation system
• A careful balance between text and graphic elements
• Information rich pages that describe your content clearly and include textual references to those things that are important for your business
• Links to other sites and further information
• Use of 'title' and 'alt' tags

Undesirable Qualities

• A dead-end site that has no external links
• Over-use of 'flash', 'frames' and 'graphics'
• Poorly formed html code
• Broken links
• Insufficient use of words that associate your site with your business

Appearance in search engines

How long before my site will appear?

Times vary with the different search engines but allow up to 3 months before your site will appear in a search engine. Please Note: most search engines will not guarantee that your site will be listed even if you manually submit it.

Submitting to search engines

To speed up the process of having your site appear in search engines you can manually submit your site address and sometimes a description of your site's content. As mentioned above there are no guarantees even by doing this.

To manually submit your site to a search engine, open the homepage of the search engine in your browser and look for a link similar to "Submit your site". Sometimes it can be quite difficult to find the submission page and you may be faced with a number of paid alternatives before finding an option for a free listing. From there follow the steps outlined by the particular search engine.

Advertising with search engines

Is it worth paying to advertise with a search engine?

This is a difficult question that can only be answered by you, the business owner. When evaluating the idea take into account the importance of trading on the internet, your intended market, your other marketing options and the budget you can allow for search engine advertising.

If you feel that paid advertising is a good option for you, try it for a limited time and monitor the results. Not all search engine advertising works and therefore it is not all good value for money. Sometimes the equivalent amount spent on a well directed local or target specific campaign using print, radio or T.V. will yield better results. Proceed with caution.

Popular search engines

Google

MSN

Yahoo

Ask Jeeves