The number of search engines in the world continually changes from month to month as companies rise, fall and merge with other search engines. This has been the norm since the first search engine Aliweb came on the scene in 1993. Many search engines have come and gone and come again since then leaving in their wake a very complicated and bewildering landscape for Web site marketers to navigate. The good news is, even though there are hundreds of search engines out there, you only need to be concerned with a hand full of them in order to be successful. Here are some quick tips on creating a successful search engine optimization (SEO) plan.

First of all, many people get confused between paid placements and organic or natural placements. Paid placements are (as the term implies) placements in search engines that get ranked based upon how much is paid for the keyword. The paid placements in the major search engines are very distinguishable from the organic listings. Paid placements in Google appear along the top (usually 3 or 4 listings) and then along the far right side of the page. The organic listings appear in the body of the page. Other major search engines use a similar approach. A paid listing does not displace or affect the organic listings. In other words, you cannot pay Google to have a top ten organic listing. Organic listings are the results of the search engine’s efforts to index the Web and return those results based upon what the search engine creators think are most relevant. How exactly the search engines do that is a closely guarded secret by every search engine. If their indexing methods were public knowledge, people would manipulate the methods to not only secure top positions for their sites but to also block other sites. Theses techniques are known as “spamming the search engine”, and it is a continual problem for search engines. The punishments for spamming are very severe and will usually cause your site (domain) to be blocked and not listed at all.

Getting organic listings is free with most search engines and many will index your site without your knowledge. The search engines accomplish this by sending out what they call a “spider” whose only mission is to find Web sites and send the indexing details back to home base. If you have pages on your site you don’t want indexed or that you don’t want to show up in search engine results, you can place the following meta tag on your page, which will be effective with most search engines but not all.

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

While there are many search engines that will find your site, you don’t want to leave your search engine placements to chance when it comes to the top five largest search engines since they account for about 80% of all searching on the Internet. Depending upon what language your site is in, the top five search engines are:

1. Google

2. Yahoo

3. MSN

4. AOL

5. Ask.com

If your site is multilingual (especially Chinese and Korean) the top five are:

1. Google

2. Yahoo

3. Baidu (most popular Chinese search engine)

4. MSN

5. NHN (most popular Korean search engine)

The rules of indexing are a little different for each search engine so it is therefore very important to submit pages that have been optimized just for that specific engine. This requires extra time and patience to get right. Keep in mind that search engine optimization is an everyday effort, not a hit and run. Once you’ve made your initial submission to each search engine, test your ranking regularly. Since search engines get tens of thousands of submissions daily, your rank can change dramatically daily especially if you are in a competitive industry.

The easiest way to find out how to adjust your home page so that it will get ranked higher in a search engine is to study the Web sites who already have top rankings. When studying your competitor’s web pages, pay special attention to the copy and the title of the home page. Most search engines rank higher if the searched keyword is contained in the body of the Web page, but having the keyword too many times on a page can hurt you (keyword spam). Also make sure that all your image tags have the Alt=”" attribute, and place relevant words and phrases there. Lastly, and the most important for Google is links to your site. Google will give your site a higher rank based upon how many other sites link to yours. This gets a little tricky since most people list their sites with Google in order to get links to their site. Start with your friends and suppliers and negotiate links with them. Most sites will share links if you will in like manner provide a link back to them. Do searches on your industry in general and look for industry organizations and such that might be a good source for link exchanges. Another really great place to solicit links is to search for blogs that deal with your industry. Contact the blog owner and request reciprocal links. Stay away from paid linking services and links to your site that are unrelated to your business, such links could be considered as spamming behavior by the search engine (see http://blog.westhost.com/2007/11/paid-linking-takes-a-hit/ for more information).

Keep in mind that some search engines take up to 3 weeks for an initial submission to show up in their listings. Don’t be afraid to submit often. Search engine’s love new submissions since it implies that its indexing information is up to date and it saves their spider the time and effort to index your site on its own.

Finally, remember that a good SEO strategy is a continual work in progress and is like a good investment portfolio. You start with what you have and grow it over time.

Have you ever struggled with your product images in osCommerce? Why are they so distorted? Why do they look pixelated?

Lets look at getting these images under control. After all, bad product images are not going to help sell the product.

First, keep in mind that you want to upload a decent size image. The majority of problems I see with poor quality product images in osCommerce result from the images being too small. This causes them to be blown up by the browser where they are displayed on the site. To avoid this, be sure to upload an image at least as large as the largest it will be displayed. By default in osCommerce this is 100 pixels wide by 80 pixels high. The image pop-up window will display the image at what ever size is uploaded so we don’t need to worry about that here.

*Getting rid of the distorted, or stretched image:
This is probably the easiest of the fixes. The product image sizes are handled within the osCommerce administration area. You will want to go to Configuration > Images in the admin. The ‘Small Image Width’ and ‘Small Image Height’ are the fields that control the product images (everything from the new products, the product information page, to the shopping cart). For starters you will want to decide if you want to restrict images by width or height. Restricting the images by both is where a lot of the problems come in to play. In most cases I think it works out best to restrict by the width. To do this simply edit the Small Image Height value and delete it. Then set the Small Image Width to the maximum width you want to allow, between 150-200 is usually good for the basic osCommerce store.

Now when you check out your store front you will notice that the images will no longer be distorted or stretched. The height of the image will be automatically figured based on the width that you entered in the administration area.

*Making your ’shrunken’ images clearer
You will notice when you upload a nice size product image (300 x 300 or larger) for the product image pop-up, that the other places it is displayed smaller are ‘fuzzy’. This is a result of the browser shrinking the large images to the smaller size. Another problem with this is that the browser is actually having to download the larger image, and then display it smaller. This obviously can hurt your page load times. There are multiple modules available that offer an array of solutions to this issue. I will briefly touch on two different kinds.

You will find modules that create the thumbnail images on the fly (‘On the Fly’ Auto Thumbnailer using GD Library for example). Essentially when the image is needed the module creates a temporary smaller version and serves that to the browser. This option effectively eliminates downloading the larger image and then resizing it. Another benefit is that it does not store cached thumbnail images on the server taking up space. On the same note, a down side is that it creates these thumbnails on the fly each time the image is requested.

Another module solution is one that creates a cached version of the thumbnail image on the server and uses that image file instead of the large version (Automatic Thumbnails for example). The main benefit here is that you are not recreating the thumbnail on the fly each time it is requested. The module simply creates the thumbnail image on the server the first time it is requested and then uses that for each subsequent image request. I guess you could argue that the downside to this is that it creates images on your server and therefore requires space.

With either option the end result will be much clearer, better looking smaller product images in your store. Let’s face it, product images go a long way to selling a product. They need to be the correct proportion and they need to be clear.