Search engine positioning is a subject of major interest. The B2B W4 formula was developed to promote sales as a book store associate. In order for the strategy to succeed, Findians Paradise web pages had to dominate the search engines, every single one without exception, so that anyone searching for books would be immediately drawn to none other but these. Three specialist subjects, Polymers, Microelectronics and Project Management, and its associated topic of Concurrent Engineering, plus a random fifth subject, Social Responsibility in Business, were chosen for this study. These were chosen to test present effectivity vis-à-vis the past. Only the first 30 results of each search engine were accepted. The results are truly remarkable. This report shows the outstanding results of a small computer-idiot one-man operation in Finland who dominates the search engine returns in all the major nine search engines covering over 1.3 billion web sites. In the field of books, Findians Paradise web pages are the only really serious book store revealed on the web, not only in the chosen categories but also in almost every topic covered by this book store. The results reveal that there are three types of search engine returns. This article demonstrates the success of the B2B W4 formula and the associated web marketing strategy. The B2B and B2C W4 formulae are the subject of three books to be published during 2001. You can now read about the first "Reaching the Top in Search Engines". Details of the other two will be on the web shortly.
Search engine positioning is a subject of major interest. The B2B W4 formula was developed to promote sales as a book store associate. In order for the strategy to succeed, Findians Paradise web pages had to dominate the search engines, every single one without exception, so that anyone searching for books would be immediately drawn to none other but these. Three specialist subjects, Polymers, Microelectronics and Project Management, and its associated topic of Concurrent Engineering, plus a random fifth subject, Social Responsibility in Business, were chosen for this study. These were chosen to test present effectivity vis-à-vis the past. Only the first 30 results of each search engine were accepted. The results are truly remarkable. This report shows the outstanding results of a small computer-idiot one-man operation in Finland who dominates the search engine returns in all the major nine search engines covering over 1.3 billion web sites. In the field of books, Findians Paradise web pages are the only really serious book store revealed on the web, not only in the chosen categories but also in almost every topic covered by this book store. The results reveal that there are three types of search engine returns. This article demonstrates the success of the B2B W4 formula and the associated web marketing strategy.
The B2B and B2C W4 formulae are the subject of three books to be published during 2001. You can now read about the first "Reaching the Top in Search Engines". Details of the other two will be on the web shortly.
Ever heard of Findians Paradise on the web?
"No!" you say. I am not surprised. Even I would be tempted to say that, except that - I am Findians Paradise.
It is unlikely that you would have if you have been just a casual internet web surfer. However, if you had been searching for books, using any of the 9 major search engines (Alltheweb.com, Altavista.com, Excite.com, Google.com, Iwon.com, Lycos.com, MSN.com, Northernlight.com, Yahoo.com), or even one of the 1000+ others, this name would have crossed your path.
Why?
Because Findians Paradise Book Store pages appear unfailingly when you search the web for books (Fig.1). How could this small one-man attic room operation in the frozen Arctic have got such excellent positioning in all major search engines?
The answer lies in the B2B W4 formula. The result of an investigation on what position Findians Paradise web pages had reached in all the major search engines in specific topics covered by this book store is presented here. The article should enlighten you how you too could reach this pinnacle.
Visit Google.com. Above their search box you are told that their search index covers over 1.3 billion web pages. There are substantially over 1.3 billion web pages presently recorded by the 1000+ commercial search engines. Nine search engines constitute the top, carrying out 75% of the daily searches. This report presents the results from these 9 for five identical queries put to each.
The queries that were entered were based on the string "Books about .....". Five topics of science, engineering, management and business interests, namely - Polymers, Microelectronics, Project Management, Concurrent Engineering and Social Responsibility in Business were investigated. These are the topics that represent the key professional interest areas of the Findians Paradise Book Store.
The Findians Briefings web magazine, in English, was started in 1996 January as a forthright fortnightly from Finland targeted at a small group of Finns and Indians with common interests. The web magazine was the replacement of a hard copy newsletter that had been circulated, free of cost, to major industrialists and decision makers in Finland and India. The use of the web was an ideal opportunity to cut production and distribution costs, reach the same target market, and simultaneously open up the availability to a much wider global audience. The transition process was assisted by some exposure on the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) discussion list, thanks to the moderator, Prof. Sreenath Srinvasan of Columbia University and the Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO), thanks to its President, Prof. Thomas Abraham. Many Keralites (i.e., persons who have origins in Kerala, India) in particular, took a great liking to the site as it was dedicated to Mr. K. C. Mammen Mappillai, the doyen of Kerala in the first half of the 20th century, the man who established the Malayala Manorama to become what it is today, the largest and best newspaper enterprise in India.
During the summer of the same year, to cover operational costs to run this internet operation, Findians Briefings became one of the earliest associates of Amazon.com, claimed to be earth's largest on line book supplier. There were less than 50,000 associates at that time.
Web pages were established to market books in topics that interested the editors. The main topics consisted of Polymers, Microelectronics and Project Management, and the associated subject of Concurrent Engineering. Findians Paradise Book Store was the name used to house these lists, promoted by the phrase, "Paradise in the Amazonian Jungle".
Being the originator of the term Findians, representing what is common between Finland and India, web pages listing books about Finland and India were set up. Being Apple Macintosh addicts, pages listed books on this subject. Because of an interest in Business in India, Industry in India, Stamps and Women of India, pages on these subjects appeared. Having close friends in many countries, pages about the Arab Region, the Baltic Region (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Bhutan, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, and Zambia came into being. Being involved with the internet, publishing and scientific text editing, pages on email, Publishing (Desk Top and Web) and Technical Writing were created. Other pages were developed at the book store based on the varied and wide interests of the editors and its customers, such as on Acupuncture, Animal Abuse, Cruelty and Welfare, Aviation (B17 Bombers), Fertilisers, Model Railways, Veganism and Vegans and Yoga, There were also pages listing books about great personalities as Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, philosopher President Radhakrishnan, the Nehru Dynasty, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, educationist Maria Montessori, as well as famous Indian and internationally renowned authors as P. G. Wodehouse, R. K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul. Being downright lazy, the hit page of the Easy Way to get things done also found pride of place in this book store.
All these pages followed an essential but very simple format, which consisted of:
1. a descriptive title, 2. a short introduction, 3. a list of publications sorted by year of publication, starting with the most recent publications, 4. links to other pages on associated subjects in the book store, 5. links to other subjects covered by the book store, and 6. a short end piece informing the surfer whom to contact in case of any assistance required.
Findians Paradise quickly became the browsing point for on line book lovers. They found the way the books were presented, based on year of publication, an easy way to locate the most recent book on any subject. Most surfers were looking for the very latest information. Being presented with an uncluttered page, no pictures or images, but just a date-wise bibliographic list was most convenient. Clicking on the link would quickly take them to the images and details about the publication. If they were looking for a particular keyword, they could enter it as a "Find on the page" search within the browser. This would take them to the first book with that word on that page. If they were looking for a particular title or author, this could also be quickly ascertained from this "Find on the page" search query. ISBN and ASIN numbers could be, similarly, immediately located.
If they had problems, they could send an email to the book store. They did not get a reply from an autoresponder. They received a personal reply within 24 hours, enhancing the reputation of this on line store and giving it the corner store feeling. Findians Paradise earned its name as a truly comprehensive service-oriented on line book store.
These efforts did get some excellent publicity in the initial stages, especially since no one had earlier attempted to list the publications in this fashion. Apple Macintosh computer lovers could quickly see which books were related to which model based on the year of publication, and so on. Guy Kawasaki, the Mac Evangelist at that time, and the author of many marketing books, as well as Mac User groups, helped publicise this effort through their email discussion lists. Various other interests groups complimented the site because of the novelty of on line book store associates.
However, this was self-defeating. Many entrepreneurial internet surfers, seeing a potential of being an associate, jumped on to the band wagon. Little did they realise that they were just being used by the parent group. They did not realise that if an associate wanted to make money out of this business, they would have to put in very long hours and come up with an original marketing formula which kept them ahead of the enormous competition, and above all, ahead of a parent who was likely to cut into their revenue and steal their original marketing ideas once the associate became successful. Also, they would have take all steps to be discovered on the ballooning web without spending a lot of money. Not a very easy task.
The novelty factor about associates in the media quickly wore off. There was no real publicity value in doing interesting stuff to promote the web pages through the web media. It was only the really hard grind individuals who had put in a lot of serious effort to build a successful associate web site that stayed on to make money out of this business. The rest put up banners and cursed their "personal" misfortune of "their" not making any money as an associate.
At the start, the Findians Paradise Book Store did not have its own domain name. That of the Finnish Internet Service Provider (ISP), netppl.fi, was used. The ISP provided comprehensive logs. It was possible to see how the hits were coming to the web pages and to decide where more effort should be put to tidy up the pages and get rid of major errors, etc.
During the first three years of operations, Findians Briefings handled a wide variety of subjects, and went up on time. On the web it is said, "Content is King". What this magazine learnt was that "Original Content was Supreme". The originality drove traffic to it, and not just of Finns and Indians having a common interest. The humour and jokes were not something one could read elsewhere. The recipes were unique, the articles were not something picked up off a newswire.
The largest group of readers were non-resident Indians (NRIs) in the USA who found a homely site airing views similar to what they were feeling while being alone in front of their computers in a strange land. They loved reading about a native cure for migraine, why western recycling compared to the Indian model was doomed, about a visit to the Kanha wild life sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh in India, and details of the huge global scam being carried on by some fraudsters from Nigeria.
By placing the Amazon.com search box on all the topical pages, and in the archived issues, not only did the Findians Paradise Book Store get growing sales of books from its dedicated readers, but also the individual book store pages got exposed frequently to this audience. The pages which continuously drew visitors were, however, the Findians Briefings archived pages on humour and on the real life articles written by the editors. And, the search engines were generous in listing these pages amongst the top in their specific categories.
As advised by all the web marketing gurus, the web page addresses, also known as Universal Resource Locators (URLs) were submitted, admittedly very irregularly, to a few of the 1000+ search engines. Only free submission services were used. Occasionally, some sites were submitted for some appropriate web award. In the bargain, a couple of awards were won, never for style, but always for content. The editors took part in a few discussion groups, not very fervently, and never to directly push the web sites. Books on Cricket and Golf were possible exceptions to this rule.
The pages were remarkably simple. in fact, childishly simple. There were no meta tags on any of the pages, mainly because at that time one did not know what the heck was a meta tag. No keywords or tricks were used to indicate to search engine robots what the site was all about. There were simple titles on each page which accurately reflected the contents. No gimmicks, no javascript, no frames. Plain fast loading web pages suitable for every type of web browser from text browsing using lynx in a shell account on a unix machine to whatever latest browser was available.
One young web-savvy Indian living in the US who visited the site commented that they were just too plain and that they would never be successful unless there were good images, frames, frills pretty pictures and logos normally associated with web pages!! But the hits just kept coming as was evidenced from the logs. During any given month, the site was experiencing some 50,000 hits from as many as 80 countries. In those days, these were staggering figures for a novice webmaster.
A few times, casual studies of the major search engines were done of the keywords that represented some of the pages. It was gratifying to see that book store pages always featured somewhere in the top 30 sites on most search engines. Given this situation the status quo was maintained. It was also nice to see the Amazon.com commission income gradually increase as the orders to clicks ratio climbed steadily from a miserable 0.1% to a healthy 2.6%.
Content focus with high exposure in the search engine was the factor which converted clicks to orders, which is one of the most important aspects of the B2B W4 formula.
In December 1998, for personal reasons, all web development activity was put on hold. The pages and hits were left look after themselves. The hits, clicks and Amazon.com orders continued to grow, regardless.
In 1999 December, an important resolution was made to set up with the book store's own domain name. This was registered as findians.com with a new ISP (in Canada) and the web pages were set up gradually, commencing February 2000.
There were three accounts with netppl.fi, one in the name of Findians, and two in the personal names of the editors. The main files were kept on the Findians account. The ones relating to the personal interests of the editors were kept in their personal name accounts.
When the findians.com domain name was established, contrary to what is standard practice amongst experienced webmasters, a major decision was made not to change the existing set up. It was decided to duplicate in findians.com, as far as possible, the main account at netppl.fi, almost as a mirror, but not quite as the mirror. This was to be a duplicate site to test the benefit of having an own domain name. A sixth sense sort of warned not to close or run down the original web sites.
The pages with the findians.com domain name were established and logs watched to see how the Amazon.com sales were reacting.
It was surprising to see that sales through the netppl.fi web pages were steadily increasing. No significant sales were being generated through findians.com. All the necessary steps were taken of submitting the major pages housed at this site to the 30 or so larger search engines, again using free submission services as provided by the many service groups as ineedhits.com.
The clicks and orders were, however, continuing to be generated from the netppl.fi sites. The 3 or 4 major search engines were also revealing only the netppl.fi sites.
There were still no meta tags and other gimmicks to tell the search engine robots what to do on any of the pages.
Then, in May/June 2000, one saw a major policy shift within Amazon.com. Amazon.com started tinkering with their reporting mechanism with a period of going off-line with their Associate reporting for almost two weeks. Then, there was a dramatic drop in the Amazon.com earnings. Amazon.com, under pretext of some obscure clause in their associate agreement, removed certain types of customers from generating commissions for their associates.
One did not have to be blind to see what was behind the tactics of Amazon.com. Their intention was to wean away clientele of their Associates by building a database structure which would woo the web surfers to go directly to Amazon.com to buy their needs. For instance, they saw success in presenting the book lists by year of publications, as had been done on the Findians Paradise pages at the outset. So, they offered this as a search option. They offered customers the option to keep their personal Wish Lists on line. These customers would no longer come through the associates, but directly through their Wish Lists, denying the associates the commission.
Drastic action was necessary as the writing was clearly on the wall. The management at Amazon.com had decided, because of continued losses, that it could not afford to pay 5% to its associates for leads, let alone 15%. They were resorting to tactics to dump associates who were successful but by pushing their exposure to associates who were unsuccessful but gave them broad exposure and publicity and were unconcerned about revenue generated. So a banner on high traffic sites as Altavista, Excite, MSN or Yahoo was more important to Amazon.com than the sales being generated by hard working associates. Yet they wanted the publicity of their associate scheme to tempt more people to join and become committed customers rather than associates.
If one takes the total quarterly sales of Amazon.com and divides by the total number of associates reported registered by Amazon.com, one gets a figure which could be taken to represent the average sales of an associate. However, this is not strictly true, as possibly half Amazon.com sales are probably not generated by associates. By this token, Findians Paradise was between 100 to 500 times better than an average Amazon.com associate. Amazon.com wanted to see these sales (and those of other successful associates) drop while they increased the number of ineffective associates where they could get brand name exposure rather than sales. Amazon.com was interested in having a million or so associates which would give them more than 10 to 50 million free ad points on the internet - but they were not really interested in seeing that these ad points generated steady and increasing revenue for the exposure FOR THE ASSOCIATES.
Hence, if any associate was drawing in sales, the Amazon.com in-house decision was to place every hurdle in its path to ensure that the sales revenue would drop in favour of direct sales from Amazon.com. This included methods which can only be described as not quite ethical. Till today, that is the strategy being adopted by the Amazon.com management.
On several occasions Findians Paradise took up cudgels with Amazon.com. Only by shouting loud enough was it possible to prove that they were bluffing their way through (or they would have to admit that their IT division was incompetent). They finally admitted that Findians Paradise was right on every occasion.
Given that situation, it became obvious that the only way for Findians Paradise to survive as an associate was to expand the base of associates and affiliations and offer books and other products from other on line book and consumer product suppliers. Unfortunately, not one of the others in the book trade, except Barnes and Noble, had an easily workable system which would ensure the successful implementation of the B2B W4 formula strategy. There was no possibility of including Barnes and Noble, as their rider for associates is exclusivity, which was certainly not practical considering the returns possible from being their associate.
Hence, leaving Barnes and Noble aside, Findians Paradise Book Store became affiliated with over 15 major on line book suppliers, plus it introduced a novel way for customers to check the availability and comparative prices of books in multiple on line book suppliers through the Rocket Affiliate Search Box at the top of every book store page. Several other novel features are now in the process of being introduced, each targeted at making life for a customer to the book store easier and more pleasing.
The strategy rests on two major pillars. The first is in distributing the traffic which was going to Amazon.com gradually and evenly to the other on line book suppliers, most with better commission rates that Amazon.com. The second is in ensuring that wherever Amazon.com was denying legitimate commissions to the associates, to develop a strategy which ensured a commission return for the associate.
The implementation of this methodology is now in progress. The click throughs are now being generated to other on line book suppliers while there is a steady erosion of commissions at Amazon.com, but still sufficient revenue to maintain the operations. These have still to generate into an order pattern on the new associates/affiliates, moving from the 0.1% to the 2.5%, which was what had happened during the course of 2 years in the case of Amazon.com. This will happen as due process as the strategy of the B2B W4 formula moves to active Phase 3.
However, in order for this strategy to succeed, Findians Paradise Book Store must dominate the search engines, every single one, so that anyone searching for books will be immediately drawn to none other than these pages, be it on the original ISP or the new domain name.
In order to estimate the effect of the search engine domination strategy, an excellent meta tag policy (since now the information was available on how to create effective meta tags) was implemented. Presently the meta tags on the "Books about Yoga" page look like this:
<HEAD> <TITLE>Findians Paradise - Books about Yoga</TITLE> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1"> <meta name="generator" content="Tex-Edit Plus, Pagespinner"> <meta name="ROBOTS" value="index,follow"> <meta name="ABSTRACT" content="ETNICA TMI, Findians Paradise OnLine Book Store - Yoga Section"> <meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="Findians Paradise Yoga Section Web Page OnLine Store is your source for published information on books, abstracts, directories and conference proceedings about Yoga, Ayurveda, tantra, sex, Yoga Instruction, Videos, Meditation Music, Yoga Classes, Tapes, CDs, CD Players, CD Recorders, Computer Peripherals, Video Recorders, Metaphysics, New-Age, Physical Wellbeing, Metaphysical, Philosophical, Philosophies, Proof God, Proofs, God, Existence, Paramahansa Yogananda, Transformation, herbal-remedies, Alternative Medicine, Awareness, Center, Being, Center Being, Wellness, Yogi, Master, Gurus, Truth, Self-awareness, Yogananda, Roy Davis, new age, CD, Program, cd-rom, herbs, homeopathy, ayurveda, alternative medicines"> <meta name="keywords" content=" Yoga, Yoga Instruction, Videos, Meditation Music, Yoga Classes, Tapes, CDs, CD Players, CD Recorders, Computer Peripherals, Video Recorders, Metaphysics, New-Age, Physical Wellbeing, Metaphysical, Philosophical, Philosophies, Proof God, Proofs, God, Existence, Paramahansa Yogananda, Transformation, herbal-remedies, Alternative Medicine, Awareness, Center, Being, Center Being, Wellness, Yogi, Master, Gurus, Truth, Self-awareness, Yogananda, Roy Davis, new age, CD, Program, cd-rom, herbs, homeopathy, ayurveda, alternative medicines, tantra, sex, Abstract, Abstracts, Conference, Directory, Encyclopedia, Guide, Guides, Handbook, Handbooks, Pollution, Proceedings, Quality, Research, Symposium, Technical, Technology, Volume, Volumes, Yearbook"> <meta name="OWNER" content="Annikki & Jacob Matthan, findians@findians.com"> <meta name="AUTHOR" type="email" value="findians@findians.com"> <meta name="STATUS" value="Update"> <meta name="LANGUAGE" value="en-US"> <meta name="ABSTRACT" value="1"> <meta name="LASTUPDATE" value="Sunday, November 26, 2000"> <meta name="SECURITY" value="Public"> <meta name="FORMAT" value="text/html"> <meta name="COPYRIGHT" value="Copyright (c) 2000 by ETNICA TMI"> <meta name="CHARSET" value="ISO-8859-1"> <meta name="OWNER" type="email" value="findians@findians.com"> <meta name="DOCUMENTCOUNTRYCODE" value="fi"> <meta name="DOCUMENTLANGUAGECODE" value="en"> </HEAD>
The revamped findians.com pages are being gradually resubmitted to the important search engines. The intention is that besides keeping the present good ratings of netppl.fi, the web surfer looking for books can be taken to the newly designed, yet utterly simple, and updated web pages.
This process began in August 2000 and has since continued at a slow but steady pace. In early December, it was decided that it was time to evaluate effectivity on all the major 9 search engines.
5 topics were chosen, the first four being Polymers, Microelectronics, Project Management and its associated subject, Concurrent Engineering, to assess the long term effectivity. A new page had been added to the book store in August 2000, one on Social Responsibility in Business. This topic was added to this list, in order to test the present effectivity of the domination strategy. If this page was being shown up on the search engines, then the findians.com domain name was being actively included in the searching operation, and it would be possible to gradually run down the pages at netppl.fi and use that space for some more effective web strategy trials.
It is a well known fact that web surfers searching for something on the internet look through the results of mainly the first three pages presented by a search engine. If they do not find the results in the top 30, they move on to another search engine. It is also known that the web surfers who are searching are not fools. They disregard sites which they know have paid to be listed. Search engines adopting this paid positioning policy are being ignored by serious web surfers as they know that if a company has to pay for its listing, the page cannot have much content or merit.
Hence, only the first 30 positions of the unpaid listings in the category of web pages on each search engine were counted in this study. A Number 1 placing was awarded 30 points, with a decreasing point count for subsequent placings, ending at 1 point for a Number 30 placing. Points were given separately for the old ISP, netppl.fi, sites and for the findians.com domain name sites, to see how each domain name stood on the search engines. The sum of both was used to analyze the overall effectivity of a search engine in each topic.
Some competing relevant sites were also evaluated. As none of them even remotely reached the level of effectivity of Findians Paradise Book Store over even half of the 9 major search engines in any topic, these results were considered insignificant and are not reported here. In summation, Findians Paradise Book Store presently has no competition on the web.
Further, the exact title of the Findians Paradise page that was being thrown up by the search engine was not given a separate weightage and it was given the same rating value, whether it was a relevant search or not (as is evident from Fig. 1). The calculations have also been done for relevancy on a slightly different basis, in which only the top 10 placings in each search engine have been analyzed. This will be the subject of a subsequent research report. However, it is possible to indicate that the Findians Paradise Book Store positioning over any competition is significantly greater if the relevancy test is done. The present exercise was to obtain a clearer idea of the brand name exposure in the search engines.
The results of points earned for each topic on each domain name, and the total points for each topic, in each of the 9 search engines are shown in Table 1. It is important to note the second column of sites searched. Although there are over 1.3 billion web sites on the internet, when it comes to search engine relevancy to keywords, only a relatively few sites are searched. In Altavista.com, when the search is for "Books about Polymers", it reveals that there are 16.6 million sites relating to the keyword "Books", 162,532 sites relating to the keyword "Polymers", and the search factor is 13 million sites. It is of these 13 million sites where Findians Paradise holds both the 1st and 2nd places. In Google.com, although they record 1.3 billion sites, they record only 37000 sites related to the keyword, Polymers, and in Google.com, Findians Paradise occupies all positions from 2nd to 5th, while the site which occupies 1st position is not related to the other keyword of the search, Books.
162532
59
200677
27
471334
26
25206
30
56787
29
142
3044630
42
3039845
10
8221195
71
4488755
53
4455540
0
176
20682
17315
761523
16
23825
263010
115
8225
274
6494
85
279771
6
40092
62
96958
427
22837
398
15468
420
660110
315
7
22938
357
338698
37
1527
21138
165
13995
342
601297
21475
104
323096
667
37000
84
15900
22
926000
21
23
31300
28
565000
185
138
81853
14
32971
17
19
1059506
35016
533352
97
3600
2900
25
25900
24
3200
158000
136
112
Table 2 summarises the top position held by Findians Paradise in each of the 9 search engines in each topic area. (See Note)
The results are truly remarkable. Out of 45 possible results, Findians Paradise web pages hold 21 No. 1 spots (42%), 5 are in No. 2 spots. 3 are in No. 3 spots, 2 are in No. 4 spots and 3 are in No. 5 spots. In four search engines, the new page on Social Responsibility in Business had not yet been indexed. But, in the 5 search engines that have found it, it has reached the No. 1 spot in 4 and the No.2 spot on the 5th. Out of 45 results, 36 pages are in the top 10 - a phenomenal 80%. (The links from the topics in Table 2 show actual screen shots of some of the search results pages which demonstrate the proof of this achievement.)
Without doubt, in the field of books, Findians Paradise web pages are the only really comprehensive book store pages which are unearthed on the web in all the categories that it is active in, not only the five topics that had been chosen for this investigation. If a search relevancy factor was introduced into the analysis, then Findians Paradise would be in the top ten in almost every single category it was active in - a possible 95 - 99% result.
The results further reveal that there are clearly three distinct types of returns possible from the search engines, as has been grouped in Table 1.
1. The Sedate Search Engines: These are the ones which are slow to update but very meticulous in keeping the pages they have found active for the web surfer to find. This means that they are listing quite old sites, some, even if they are dead. If you are looking for up-to-date information, then these search engines are not really the ones to use. In Table 2, the absence of a listing in three search engines of the new page created in August 2000, but which has hit top spots in the other 5, show that surfers are probably missing the latest and best sites.
Excite.com, Iwon.com and MSN.com are the examples of the ones which do not update their indexes very quickly. Findians Paradise does not have much experience of Iwon.com as a sales generator, even though it is top in 2 out of 4 categories in this search engine. In the other three, the netppl.fi pages totally dominate the results served up to an extent there is no competitor for Findians Paradise. The findians.com sites have not even started to be show up on these search engines, except on Altavista.com, where the web page on Social Responsibility in Business has already come to 2nd position. Since the Amazon.com sales were being driven mainly by these three big search engines, Altavista.com, Excite.com and MSN.com, it was indeed fortunate that the netppl.fi pages had been kept alive for the past year, as these have continued to generate the major sales because of the sheer volume of surfers using these three search engines.
2. The Supersonic Search Engines: These are the ones that which quickly push new sites to the fore and drop the older sites, possibly to positions way down in the pecking order.
Alltheweb.com and Lycos.com are search engines which have totally swamped and demoted the netppl.fi web pages by going overboard in pushing the findians.com pages to the top. This is to an extent that in the top 30 search results none of the netppl.fi pages are visible. However, both these search engines are not very effective in sales promotion as they have relatively fewer searches being done in relation to the Sedate Search Engines. Although it is nice to virtually eliminate the competition by dominating 20 to 25 out of the first 30 results being served up, this is no guarantee of sale of products of the associates.
3. The Steady Search Engines: These are the ones who give equal balance to both the new and old sites that are found on the web.
The third group of the Steady Search Engines are Google.com, NorthernLight.com and Yahoo.com. Although the Findians Paradise Book Store occupies the very top positions on these search engines, with results from both netppl.fi and findians.com at the top, there is an equal balance of the top positions for both domain pages in these search engines. This is still translating into good sales from the main associate, Amazon.com.
What was astonishing was the relatively few sites actually searched by what are considered the most popular of the search engines, MSN.com and Yahoo.com, in all the topics. The number of sites covered by them is certainly not very indicative of what is out there on the web. The relevancy of the pages served up by both MSN.com and Yahoo.com did not in any way indicate a better analysis than the other search engines.
The B2B W4 formula employed had ensured that there was unqualified success to obtaining the brand exposure with all three types of search engines.
MSN.com kept netppl.fi sites active by 18%. It did not show up even one of the findians.com sites. Excite was showing netppl.fi sites at the top representing a 7.5% exposure and with no exposure of findians.com sites. In the case of Altavista.com, the netppl.fi sites still predominate the top positions to 7.3% but findians.com sites have made inroads into this to about 16%.
Out of a total possible score of 2325 on any search engine, the outstanding result was of findians.com on Alltheweb.com where it scored 1534 points, or 65% of the exposure. Of this, 99.9% was for findians.com sites. On Lycos.com where Findians Paradise obtained 28% of the exposure, all 100% was for findians.com sites. The netppl.fi pages were not to be seen in any of the top 30 positions studied in any category.
Google.com now gives Findians Paradise a factor of over 13% of the top rating and about 60% of this is given to the findians.com sites. Yahoo.com gives an exposure of just over 10.5% with findians.com sites taking 54% of the exposure. NorthernLight.com has a factor of over 7.8%, and the findians.com are about 42%. Findians Paradise Book Store web pages are at the very top in almost all categories in these three search engines, top positions being occupied equally by both netppl.fi and findians.com sites.
The steps taken over the last 5 years using the B2B W4 formula, which is the consistent building of simple web sites with a high degree of focus on a single subject group and over a wide topic range, not resorting to gimmicks or tricks to fool the search engines into believing something which is not there, has paid rich dividends. The steps have been consistent and took into account the differences that exist between the search engines.
Although many experts stress the importance of meta tags and other promotion steps, as submitting the sites to numerous search engines regularly, these were not found to be significant factors to reach top search engine positioning. This conclusion is reinforced by the study of the sites in other highly competitive fields, such as books about Apple Macintosh computers or books about India. Some sites at the top in these areas, like most of the earlier designed ones reported here, are totally lacking in meta tags, but were found to be highly focused on the subject and topic group with a broad spectrum of sites ensuring the degree of focus required.
In daily email which the author receives, there is literally tonnes of spam, especially from people claiming that they will guarantee that they will take the sites given to them for a fee to the top 10 in search engine listings. I do not use spam filters as I feel I can learn a lot from them. I usually check them to see where their own sites rate on the major search engines. I have not found even one of them rated in the top 100. A simple email message asking them this question usually quickly takes me off their spam list!! They do not like to be exposed as being bogus, especially by one who has been successful at what they claim to do.
Many important lessons have been learnt from this study. Obviously the lessons learned when there were only 50,000 pages on the web as against now when there are as many as 1.5 billion pages, is radically different. But some of the basic fundamentals hold good still, today.
The first and foremost lesson is that it is not necessary to have a pot of gold to promote a web site on any subject. In the case of the Findians Paradise Books Store, not US $ 1 has been spent on external promotion activities. If one is interested in establishing brand exposure on the web, it is not sufficient to set up one page, or even a dozen pages and to sit back and believe the job is done. It is also not sufficient to set up a doorway page and then a series of pages which focus on different aspects of the book stores objectives and intentions. It is not necessary to obtain a personal domain name. It is not necessary to set up fancy and classy web pages to obtain traffic. It is not necessary to spend a lot of money in promoting the sites using the various expensive promotional services which are available on the internet. It is best to avoid the spammers who promise top 10 positioning on search engines, as most of them have not achieved such a status for themselves. It is important to realise that an IT expert is not necessarily the person who can help a site reach the top in search engine placement - this author is a computer-idiot as he does not know more than a dozen command line commands. It is not necessary to spend a lot of time going to discussion groups to establish ones presence and credibility. It is not necessary to buy millions of email addresses and spam the world about the web site. And above all, it is not necessary to buy a placing in the search engines, and if one does, one will probably lose credibility.
Most of these are contra to what one is told by the "experts" on the internet.
There are many useful techniques of pushing a web site. All of them that are effective and are totally free. The recent judgement that it is not ethical to use the Whois query to study the ownership profile of any company is a big blow to many on line marketing strategists. But, there are several other ways to develop a successful targeted marketing strategy.
Since 75% of all traffic to web sites is generated from the search engines, all methods must depend on a successful presentation of the web pages on the search engines. There is no alternative to this route. The alternative is certainly not by using MLM, viral marketing or spamming. With search engine placements it is the serious customer that is approaching the seller. These customers will run a mile from any method which shows they are being compromised.
No strategy can be successful without understanding this fundamental, which is the foundation on which the B2B W4 formula is based - your customer is an intelligent human being- not an idiotic robot..
All subsequent steps of the B2B W4 formula are dependent on the domination of the search engines. Findians Paradise Book Store has achieved this first stage remarkably.
The B2B W4 formula, however, does not end at just getting a good rating on the search engines. It has to ensure that the click throughs are converted into orders and finally into revenue. The increase from the initial 0.1% to 2.5& in the case of Amazon.com showed that this was also a successful part of the B2B W4 strategy, but this is not explained here. This is a slow but irreversible process. In this, however, one must clearly see ahead the strategy plans of the parent associate and anticipate the moves that would cause a drop in earnings. Other aspects as reverse links, joint venture propositions or participation in discussion groups, all have a significant effect on increasing revenue - but all of these must be approached from a position of strength, an invincible search engine status of the web site. All these are integral to the B2B W4 formula but during subsequent phases.
A gradual increase in the bottom line is what every web marketer wants to see. That is what the B2B W4 formula delivers, starting with search engine domination.
(Note: Search engine positions are very dynamic. The results portrayed in the figures were as of 23rd December 2000.)
Jacob Matthan, a professional consultant for over 30 years, is an Indian who has lived in Finland for the last 17 years. He presently runs the ETNICA TMI International Procurement Service (IPS), which is the oldest established internet based B2B network linking private member buyers and sellers through a unique system of specialist consultants world-wide. He is a polymer technologist, a microelectronics materials engineer, scientific text editor, author of several books and articles, including the "Handbook For Survival in Finland" co-authored with his wife, editor of 3 popular focused web magazines and amongst his many interests, a social worker fighting for the rights of ethnic minorities in Finland. He has been married 34 years to his Finnish wife and has four adult children, two of whom are married, and has two wonderful 2 grandchildren. His biodata can be found on the web.
Findians, Findians Briefings, findians.com, Findians Paradise, B2B W4, Alltheweb.co, Altavista.com, Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Excite.com, Google.com, Iwon.com, Lycos.com, MSN.com, netppl.fi, NorthernLight.com, Yahoo.com are registered trademarks of various individuals and companies.
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