How Visible Is Your Gallery on the WWW?

How Visible Is Your Gallery on the WWW?

By Chris Maher

Ok, you built (or paid someone good money to build) a site on the World Wide Web, but is it accomplishing your goals? This issue of the Selling Your Art Online newsletter will focus on how to find out how to evaluate and improve out how your site ranks on major search engines.

Getting listed on search engines isn't too hard to do, most have submission pages that you visit and fill out simple forms. But getting a good ranking in response to a relevant query, that is an art. Visit Alta Vista and submit the query phrase "art gallery" and you will get 30,825,011 matches! Only the top 20 are likely to be viewed by a potential customer, perhaps the top 100 by a dedicated searcher. So what can you do to get your site to the top of that list?

First, you need to know where your site stands. There are a variety of Web tools available to assist you in monitoring your site's ranking with major search engines. You could determine this information yourself, by submitted dozens of queries to dozens of engines, but it is laborious and time-consuming work. It is far better to employ the available technology to automate the process.

Relevance ranking tools are available both as Web based services and software you install on your hard drive. Some Web-based tools are free, others are subscription based. Software that you purchase to run on your own computer can be downloaded directly from the Web.

The leading Web based free site is called Rank This! and can be found at http://www.rankthis.com/. It will do a free check of your site's ranking in AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, InfoSeek, Lycos, WebCrawler and Yahoo, as well as newer engines like Planet Search, Snap, and GoTo. The interface is a bit awkward, but the results are clear. You can check all the pages on your site with a single query. And of course the price is right. This is one of the best free online position checkers. It is well worth checking out.

PositionAgent at http://www.positionagent.com/ is a Web based subscription service that automatically tracks where your Web in 10 top search engines and directories including AltaVista, Excite, Galaxy, HotBot, InfoSeek, Lycos, Magellan, OpenText, WebCrawler and Yahoo. You pay for 6 months of service, and submit URL/keyword pairs for the service to monitor. Using your keywords, PositionAgent generates reports showing where your site's pages rank within each of the search engines. You are sent weekly e-mail reports detailing your page and position ranking within the 10 search engines for each URL/keyword combination you choose, as well as graphic reports that you can access at any time at the PositionAgent Web site.

PositionAgent has a free trial that is worth checking out at http://positionagent.linkexchange.com/free.htm. The trial version is limited to a single URL/keyword pair and is somewhat more limited in its reports than the full version, but still yields useful data about your Web site's position in the top search engines.

With its simple learning curve and regular reports, PositionAgent is a useful tool. However, weekly reports may not be enough if you are tweaking your key words and looking to see immediate results. Also, it can be pricey. Six months of service ranges from $60.00 for 5 URL/keyword pairs to $1400.00 for 200 URL/keyword pairs.

The best of the software solutions is First Place Software's WebPosition. You can download a free trial version from http://www.actquick.com/wp/download.htm. Install this software on your own computer, and you can analyze, track, and monitor multiple domain names with an unlimited number of keywords and phrases. WebPosition creates summary reports as well as detail reports that show you all the sites that are above and below you in the rankings. The reports also include useful trend analysis and alert reports. WebPosition even has an automatic scheduling feature for unattended operation.

WebPosition checks your site's visibility in major search engines, including: AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, LinkStar, Yahoo!, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Lycos, Magellan, Northern Lights, WWW, and YellowPages.

WebPosition is reasonably priced with the Standard Edition, which can track up to ten different web sites, selling for $99.00. The Professional Edition, which can track unlimited sites and create more customized reports, is $279.00. The software includes free maintenance updates for life of product, and a 45-day unconditional money-back guarantee. I would recommend this as the professional's choice, as it a tool that no serious Web promotion specialist should be without.

Finally, sometimes it just makes sense to contract out the monitoring of their Web site's visibility to a consultant knowledgeable in this area. If you choose this option, make sure that the consultant you choose is familiar with Web promotion, and not just advertising or public relations in general. Web promotion is a specialty that is changing so fast that you should use someone who is following the developments in this area very closely. Also, a professional in this area can work with you to modify your site to improve your search engine ranking, something that is likely to increase your site's traffic.

This page last updated: 09/02/04

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