cre8pc - 5:30 pm on Jun 30, 2000 (gmt 0)

I've been submitting websites since 1996 for small businesses to large. Content IS king. If you follow gurus Danny Sullivan, Jakob Nielsen, Michael Wong, Brett Winters, Shari Thurow...to name a few...and either go to search engine conferences and/or seminars, then you hear it straight from the engine reps themselves.

Content is critical to rank. Content is critical for good UI. Branded content is critical for repeat traffic. Following "sticky" UI standards is also part of the equation. If you don't design for repeat traffic, then link pop is affected, and therefore, for many engines including Google, so is rank.

As Brett T. points out, the early years were prime time for submitting pages specifically designed for each engine. Nowadays, most algorithms are nearly identical. Meta tags aren't the "in" thing anymore.

I've always "generically optimized" sites for years and am so successful at it that I can no longer take new clients, but have to refer requests out to other services. I never use automatic software. I've manually done all site promo work since day 1 and my reputation is based on that fact.

This means, no cloaking. Rarely do I do doorways, although some sites require some form of one. My site has enjoyed great rank for years and has never been put through the kinds of things people are told to do by other services. My site, though, is content driven.
If it was dynamically driven, I'd be sunk.

Today's world of promo is hell. What worked for us a few years ago is practically hopeless in an environment of cloaking abuse, cloning, domain spamming, doorway and hallway mis-use, and quite simply, the fact that there's a billion pages in some databases now.

Webtop, a newcomer, announced it's reached the billion point, indexing millions a day.

It's no longer as easy (as if!) to optimize for specific engines. I haven't bothered with that in years, for my site, or clients. It's more of a popularity contest. Advertise the crap out of the site. Network. Link everywhere. Drive traffic!

I have a client that has a homepage only. The entire website is still being built. They advertised their unique service on tv, and were covered by print media.
The homepage is there to collect emails of interested people. They get over 10,000 impressions a day! I was hired to optimize and get the site into engines, to drive more traffic and assist the web development team in building it to meet engine specs. I was amazed at their traffic without even having a finished site. Just imagine what will happen when the engines get it.
For engines that use traffic as an indicator of popularity, this site is already "in".

Another client was getting almost a million impressions a month. The site is for sale, and they needed to surpass the million to look more attractive to prospective buyers. I was hired to push them up in rank. All I did was "generically optimize", and redesign their sitemap to act like a doorway and resubmitted the homepage only and then 3 months later, the sitemap only. They zoomed up in rank on all engines, traffic went crazy and now, they have so many offers they can pick and choose.

I see tons of "advice" and some of it works, depending on the situation. Overall, what works is building a REALLY functional site that meets a need. Jakob Nielsen's site is very well known and he's considered by many to be a design god. His site is content driven and not the most impressive looking in the world <g>
Danny Sullivan's site is number 1 for engine research. Again, it's not a glamorous site. It's content driven.

Sometimes the simplest approach is the one that works best.

Kim Krause
Site Optimization Specialist