INKTOMI - THE RISING STAR IN THE SEARCH ENGINE WARS

Up to now optimizing for Google was the only way to go for many webmasters, but as we've seen with Google's last round of updates the reliance on solely one search engine to bring qualified traffic is a bad strategy.

There's no doubt in our mind that Google will continue to dominate as a heavy-weight in the search engine arena for 2004, but Inktomi is a hefty contender not to be taken mildly. If your site's not listed in Inktomi -in addition to Google- you may as well consider it non-existent. Why? Google will still retain a decent percentage of search traffic even after Yahoo officially stops showing Google results...in favor of it's own technology, which is brought to you by Inktomi. Thus, visiblity in both Google and Inktomi is a must and optimizing for Inktomi can no longer be overlooked! (In case you didn't know, Yahoo announced it's dumping Google in favor of its own search results and has a deal to deliver Inktomi results to MSN as well. Read the news update here.)

Submitting Your Site to Inktomi

There are several options for submitting your site to Inktomi's index and partner sites:

1. Pay For Inclusion: if you want to ensure your pages get into Inktomi, this is the way to go. The big benefit of paying for inclusion is that you are ensured that your pages will get refreshed every 48 hours. So, any changes that you make will be reflected within 48 hours of being uploaded, versus playing a waiting game as done with other engines as to when pages will be updated.

Go to one of the following Inktomi partners to submit your site: Positiontech.com or Ineedhits.com

Currently, the pricing for paid inclusion is $39 for the first URL and $25 for each url thereafter. If you can afford to submit more than one page by all means do so!

2. Submit directly to Inktomi for free: we do not suggest doing this because it tends to be unreliable with no guarantees of inclusion. Sure, you can't beat the price because it's free and if your budget is tight this may be the way to go, but this should only be a temporary option until you can pay for a more reliable method of inclusion.

3. Get crawled by Inktomi: the most effective method of getting your site crawled by Inktomi is to get a link from a site that is among "Inktomi Best of the Web" (also known as the BOW index).

Five Quick Tips for Optimizing for Inktomi

• It's important to follow the basic principals of ethical search engine optimization, including optimizing copy and on page elements.
• Be sure your pages are meaningful and provide quality content to visitors.
• Make sure each Meta Title tag is unique for every page within your site.
• Don't keyword stuff your title tag! Make it a meaningful answer to "What is this page informing the visitor about?"
• Create a unique Meta Description tag for each page within your site and emphasize the keywords that you included in the Title Tag.