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Article by Sam Martin, PE, CVS, President of OfficeOnWeb, Technologies. 5/30/2000

One of the most pervasive myths about the Internet is that search engines are a great "free" way to market your business. In the early days, 1993-1996, this may have been true, but today it is a myth.

A search engine is different than a listing service. A search engine uses "spiders" to index a web site. Examples of search engines are: altavista.com and excite.com. A listing service will use their personnel to index the entry page for your site. Some charge a fee, some do not. Examples of listing services are: yahoo.com and usaonline.com

Search engines are "free" to the user. They profit by selling advertising that appears when a visitor uses a specific keyword or series of key phrases. That advertising appears before the search engine results. They obtain more visitors when the results of the search engine reflect the expected result of the visitor.

For most search engines, it is also "free" to request to have your web site registered on a specific search engine. They make no guarantee that they will actually register it or where it will place. They don't confirm and they often make it hard to find out if you ever were listed.

To obtain registration, you need to follow each search engine's guidelines for registration carefully. In general, you cannot register a domain more than once every 24 to 48-hours. In addition, you cannot include too many key sequences in your "marketing regions."

Registration is easy, and good placement is an art that entire companies have been formed upon. Each search engine uses a program to rank the usability of that page in terms of keywords and key phrases that their visitors are likely to use. They closely guard how they do this and some change it on a daily basis.

Why do they change so often? Remember that they achieve their highest visitation when people obtain results that are close to what they expected. If they don't change the criteria, people will learn the exact way to program the web site so that they always appear in the top rankings. The search engine companies recognize that this would allow people that are unscrupulous to "spam" their index to obtain customers.

This is why I say it is a myth that search engines are free advertising. The site must be registered properly and a follow up confirmation is needed. This takes time, expertise, and thoughtful consideration. Such experience is costly. We receive daily reports on the changes and have a person that studies the changes for as much as two hours every day just to keep up. These reports cost as much as $500 per quarter, plus the time of the person reviewing them, training others in the latest issues, and performing the actual activities to generate reasonable results for our clients. If you do it yourself, you have the same problem. Thus, the ‘free' advertising actually does cost. This does not mean that they should not be used, just balanced in the level of effort. The balance is in expending enough effort, without going overboard, so that you get a result that generates enough returns.

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Did you know that in 1998 more than 95% of OfficeOnWeb's new customers made a profit from their web site within their first year of operation? Sad, but it is true. This compares to less than 20% industry wide ever even breaking even. Why? Professional and directed expertise. This industry average for people leaving their current web service provider is 4% per month! That's nearly 50% over a year! Ours is less than 1% per year. That is because we endeavor to make our clients money and don't just offer a "pat solution" that we know has a low probability of ever making our client a profit. Some of the features that make up the level of success that our clients enjoy are:

 Five redundant backbone connections

 99.999% up time on UNIX servers

 Redundant OC-3 connect to all five backbones

 Full data center services

RAID 5 system with weekly backup of critical systems

 True Web Developer Services

 Large support site for clients and visitors

 Four level or higherencryption on all e-commerce solutions designed by Office On Web (this is the government standard required if Government people are to use a site)

 We NEVER host a commercial site on an access server (that is really bad, but common in dial up providers)

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