Let me start by saying that I am new at this. I tried using :link:mydomainname.com on altavista, lycos, hotbot, msn, yahoo, google, and aol search engines to see how many links that we have out there. I also checked to see what results our competitors are getting. I got 0 results from aol. 4 from hotbot and 332 on yahoo and google. Yahoo and google returned the EXACT same numbers on our competitors also. These are my assumptions:
1. AOL: I may not be using the correct terminology to determine links.
2. Hotbot is one of the search engines that doesn't use spiders to find links.
3. Yahoo and Google returned the same numbers because they are directories and could be using the same spider. (?)
Now with my results I think that my next step should be to look at the sites that our competitors are on and try to get a link to our site. What do you think? Am I headed in the right direction with these results?
Second concern: Our site is using asp which doesn't help me much with keywords in the search engines. We are in the process of changing this and our meta tags (which I felt were pretty useless the way they were worded). Our home page had basically zilch for text on it. These will all change within the next few weeks. So when we are up with the new site and much improved in my opinion, is it worth using Web Position Gold for optimization? These boards are absolutely priceless for the information that is shared here. I have learned so much more here than from any of the books that I have read.
