SEOTops

Today, the search engine environment is evolving rapidly, leaving SEO practitioners gasping for air in the race to quickly adapt to the ever-changing landscape. With Inktomi having ascended to the level of importance solely held by Google until recently, SEO practitioners now have been forced to rethink their strategies, tactics and maybe even the so called ‘ethics’ of technique.

So how does one work towards optimizing a website for two remarkably unique search engines without resorting to the spammy tactics such as portal-sites and leader pages? The answer to our question is not immediately obvious but lies in the analysis of the typical behavior of both these engines. While many similarities do exist, such as the behaviors of both their spiders, there is a significant difference in the way each chooses to treat a website.

Google and Inktomi choose radically different site elements to determine site placement. Google gives a lot of importance to strong, relevant link-popularity while Inktomi uses meta tags, text and titles as the most important factors for its rankings. When the GoogleBot spiders a new page, there are good chances of getting an internal page getting placed in its index, without having to pay for that specific page. This doesn’t seem likely with Inktomi. As we know, it’s a paid-inclusion service and web masters will have to pay an admission fee that’s based on the number of pages they want to be spidered by Inktomi’s bot, Slurp. Based on this pricing, for an average site with 50 pages, it can cost up to $1289 to have all it’s pages included in Slurp’s index. It is safe to assume that most small businesses won’t be willing to pay so much where there is the option of Google, whose GoogleBot and FreshBot have just about every effective internal link on their index without the need for web masters to submit them manually.

The best way to satisfy both these engines is to rethink title, text and tag placement as well as optimization of internal and external linking strategies. Keyword arrangement, density, addition of a text-based site-map, placing of unique titles and tags for each web page, concentrating on unique, original content are all points to ponder. And finally, don’t hesitate to pass on higher costs to your clients, as top placements will now require paid-inclusion of internal pages. Search engine advertising is unparalleled international exposure and well worthing paying for.