Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation Investigation

Search engine optimisation is the process of improving a website's position so that the webpage comes up higher in the search results of major search engines. All search engines have a unique way of ranking the importance of a website. Some search engines focus on the content while others review meta tags to identify who and what a web site's business is. Most engines use a combination of meta tags, content, link popularity, click popularity and longevity to determine a sites ranking. To make it even more complicated, they change their ranking policies frequently.

The aim of this project is to investigate whether automated search engine software can deliver comparable results to manual search engine submission of web sites.

This project will investigate whether automated search engine software can deliver what they promise. This will be investigated by created a number of web sites. These sites will be divided into three categories. The first category of sites will contain a number of keywords and images. They will be placed on a web server and not promoted in any way. The second category of sites will be manually promoted to 10 major search engines on a weekly basis. The final set of sites will be promoted to major search engines using commercial search engine promotion tools. The ranking of these sites in the search engines will be recorded on a weekly basis. The completion of the project should allow us to compare the three categories of sites and verify whether manual submission is better than or worse than or equal to automated submissions.

Task

Create 5 different HTML pages each containing approximately 500-600 words. Create one page that contains personal information (don't give away too much information such as address or phone but try to be specific enough), another about a local band, another about Magee College, another about Grianan fort and another about SpongeBob SquarePants. (We want the sites to be relatively obscure so that we can find them when we later have to graph the results on a fortnightly basis).

Next, name the five pages as manual_1.htm, manual 2.htm, manual_3.htm, manual_4.htm and manual_5.htm. Now copy those pages and rename the newly copied files as auto_1.htm, auto_2.htm, auto_3.htm, auto_4.htm and auto_5.htm. Finally, copy them again and this time rename them as static_1.htm, static_2.htm, static_3.htm, static_4.htm and static_5.htm.

Place these fifteen web pages in your public.www folder. They will all now be 'live' on the web for the duration of the investigation. Next, email me so that I can link to them from already listed sites that I own (as google will not list a site until at LEAST ONE OTHER site already links to it externally). Then once I have linked to you - you can begin the submissions. Remember, we do not submit the sites names static_1.htm....static_5.htm to the search engines.

Go to Tucows Promotion Software Downloads and download shareware/freeware/adware promotion tools.

Submit your sites named auto_1.htm....auto_5.htm to the following engines using the software. (try to use about five differnt software programs to submit the sites. Use the first automated software tool to submit auto_1.htm, the second tool to submit auto_2.htm etc. This allows you to have an additional dimension to your report - as we may find that cetain software programs are better at getting sites ranked.

Google UK
Yahoo UK
etc...

Now submit your manual_1.htm.....manual_5.htm sites to the above engines/directories manually by visiting the sites and choosing 'Add URL' etc. For instance, these are the links to Damian McKee Test Sites for 2005. Manual1, Manual2, Manual3, Manual4, Manual5, auto1, auto2, auto3, auto4,auto5 static1,static2. These are the links for Darren McKees sites.

Remember to resubmit manually and automatically every two weeks. You won't really need to record any of the results until week 8. Most engines claim that it take 4-8 weeks to become listed. After 8 weeks however, you should record on a weekly/fortnightly basis all the ranking results within the engines that you submit to for all your sites including the five that you don't submit to any engine (static1.htm).