Inktomi

[kathynewman]

Can anyone give any ideas what sort of results I should expect to see from submitting to Inktomi (difficult question I know!)

We submitted to them mid November and to date it has proved completely fruitless. Before the submission we did a list of our keywords and where we were on the listings for each of the Search Engines Inktomi covers.

Just gone back today to see what has happened to our listings and the answer is nothing at all - in fact in some cases it's worse - we were listed say 5th or 6th for some of our keywords on some of the engines and that listing has gone completely! - Only exception to this is dogpile.co.uk - where our listing has improved slightly.

BTW - we also did Fastweb submission - got same sort of thing there too!

Any thoughts?

Ta

Kathy

[olderscot]

Hi Kathy,

Was this a free submission or paid for inclusion?

Mike

[kathynewman]

Paid for!!

Kathy

[olderscot]

Inktomi Paid For Inclusion tends to be a waste of time if you're already in their index. All it does is guarantee that they'll spider your site quickly (important if it's a new site) but you don't get any advantage in terms of search engine ranking.

Taking an example of 'cat flaps uk' I found you to be around #38/39 in US versions of the Inktomi index and something like #14/15 of the UK version.

To get a higher position you should do some optimisation. Take a look at your site and decide which pages you want to appear in the search engines for each keyword term (such as 'cat flaps' etc). Then make it clear to the search engines what each page is about.

As an example, the cat flaps page has very little content about cat flaps on the page itself. For the search engines to know what the page is about you need to tell them. So at the very least put 'cat flaps' in the title (it's there already - good) in an <h1> heading tag (important) and put some text about cat flaps on the page for people (and search engines) to read. Just these few changes will raise your ranking significantly.

Inktomi is very like Google in terms of ranking pages, so the changes I mention above will help your rankings there as well. For more details and advice I'd suggest you check out some of the forums on search engines. (webmasterwold, searchenginewatch, etc).

Mike

[kathynewman]

Mike

Thanks for that - very helpful.

When you talk about putting more information for example in the Cat Flaps page - (which is within actinic) I presume you are talking about a say dummy product which explains what cat flaps are for and what types there are?

Also for the <h1> tag - would it be best to edit the Actinic Generated page in dreamweaver with this?

Will go off and read forums more too!

Thanks again

Kathy

[olderscot]

There are several ways of getting an <H1> heading tag and content onto the page.

One possible way would be create a 'content' product template that you would place at the top of the relevant pages. This should display the heading (and possibly sub-headings (<h3>, <H3>, etc) as well as relevant content.

One tip I'd suggest is to use CSS (either on page or in a CSS file) to get the formatting of the Heading text to match your site. The default font for an <H1> tag is horrendous and it's perfectly legitimate to change it to suit your site.

Mike