Ask Jeeves claims that every link that they have has been reviewed by a human editor. I find this difficult to swallow, due to the amount of URLs they have currently listed.

Click here for more information on Ask Jeeves' policy.

Traffic from Ask Jeeves
Okay, now that you have a background on how Ask Jeeves works, we will cover some tips which have made Ask Jeeves our best search engine referral ... better than Yahoo!, AltaVista and Excite. Like I said, it was a shocker...

First of all, our high traffic was produced by testing that I was doing on another project unrelated to Ask Jeeves. The traffic came, and after analyzing the results and testing on one of our client's sites, we validated our findings and here are the results:

First of all, you must come up with questions pertaining to your business that people will type on the web. If you don't have access to a database, it is often a guessing game. My staff can provide questions which are often entered in the search engines for your industry.

For example, if I owned a hotel or a shop in San Francisco that I wanted tourists to know about, I would focus on the following questions on my web site:

These are some of the most often asked questions in search engines regarding San Francisco.

This is how you will build the pages, and it is so easy once you have the questions to focus on.

First, the file name. Name the file the name of the question. Let's take the first one as our example, "Where can I find tourist information on San Francisco?" The file name would be:

where-can-i-find-tourist-information-on-san-francisco.html

Make sure the file is in all lower case, as that is the way 70% of the web surfers type. Separate the words with dashes, leave off the question mark at the end (search engines hate them) and finish it off with the extension of your choice (htm, html, shtml, etc.).

Next is the Title. The Title is the question. Keep it to 72 characters or less, if possible. In your code, it would look like this:

<title>Where can I find tourist information on San Francisco?</title>

Why is "San Francisco" capitalized in the Title when we made sure it was in lower case in the file name? Pure and simple, it is for aesthetics. This is your Title, and having "San Francisco" in lower case would not look right and could affect your "click-thru" rate.

Your description is next. Your description should ANSWER the question. It's as simple as that. Keep it to 150 characters or less.

<meta name="description" content=
"All the information you need on San Francisco can be found at Norma's Gifts - and it's free. Walk through our rooms of gifts as our walls show you the 'secrets' of The City By The Bay that most tourists never see.">

Meta Tag Keywords? Forget about them. They are overrated and will not help your cause according to our testing.

The body of your document. This is key. Okay, you will repeat the question in a Heading Tag, like this:

<H1>Where can I find tourist information on San Francisco?</H1>

You will then use about 300-500 words of text to answer the question, discuss your business and give compelling information with a link back to your Home Page or another page with additional information.

This is how you make your site successful on the web. Give quality, free information on topics related to your business and what people search the web for. If your information is good and compeling, the visitor is sure to visit other pages on your site, and thus their confidence in your business increases.

More buyer confidence always equals more sales.

Make sure the page matches the overall theme of your site, so the visitor doesn't think they are at another site when they go to your home page.

Now, it is time to register your pages. I suggest having a Site Map. This HTML page contains text and links to every page on your site. Include these special pages as well. Then just submit your Site Map to the engines and your work load is dramatically reduced. The engines will spider through the links and index your new pages for Ask Jeeves to access.

Make sure your site is registered with:

AltaVista
Excite
WebCrawler
DirectHit

Now, sit back, wait a few weeks and check your log files. You should have a boost in traffic via Ask Jeeves!

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© 2000, WebMarketingNow.com
Jerry West is the Director of Internet Marketing for WebMarketingNow. He has been consulting on the web since 1996 and has assisted hundreds of companies gain an upper-hand over their competition. Visit http://www.webmarketingnow.com/ for the latest in marketing tips that are tested and proven.

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Article Search Phrases: Ask Jeeves, Increase Traffic