I'm quite impressed with a well-established service that uses several modest methods to increase your website's ranking in the search engines. Once you're set up, their services are automatic, which helps keep the price low, only US $16.99 per month.
They don't make any promises to get you a top 10 or top 20 search engine ranking -- that kind of service costs 5 to 10 times as much or more. What they do aim to do is to bring a significant and steady increase in visitors to your site.
This is what they do (with a few technical explanations for those of you who understand these things):
Optimize the keywords on your home page
. They do this by studying the content of your website and analyzing your site logfiles to see what keywords your visitors are already using. With data they collect, each month they fine-tune the META tag keywords, weighting them to bring you the most traffic. If you'd like to add other pages on your site to this service, you can add them for an additional $1.50 per month.
As you gradually change the content of your site, the META keywords will reflect those changes. Over time, this service will help focus your traffic on visitors that are really looking for your products or services, not the accidental visitors that find they're not really looking for what you offer after all.
Submit your homepage to the major search engines each month
. After the META keywords are updated each month, Metamend submits your page(s) to the major search engines again so their listing will reflect the changes. If you've just submitted your site once and thought that was enough, you'll be pleasantly surprised, since regular submittal alone (even without the META keyword optimization) will cause your site to rank higher.
Set up a rudimentary gateway page
. In addition to your homepage (and any other pages you have Metamend market for you), they set up a basic gateway page, different only in the META tags, but enough different that search engines don't penalize this as "search engine spamming." This allows Metamend to tune each page slightly differently to increase the overall traffic to your site. (Note: this really doesn't compare to a full set of gateway pages, each tuned to a different search word and a different search engine, but it will grow your traffic to some degree.)
Increase the number of links to your website
. The more links pointing to your site, the more "popular" you appear in the search engines, and with some, this increases your ranking. MetaMend.com has a network of hundreds of client sites. They place some pages on your site linking to some of their other clients, put links to your site on other websites, and then register these pages with the search engines. After several months you'll find your site much more "popular" with many, many links to it. These linking pages won't bring you traffic, but the search engines will be impressed by the number of links to your site, and consider you more important. The Google search engine, for example, works this way.
Provide monthly statistics on your website traffic.
Metamend downloads your logfiles to their server and then each month updates a webpage with traffic statistics about your site using the popular Analog traffic analyzer program. I've used Analog, and it gives an excellent statistical breakdown.
That's it, but I think it will make a significant difference for a number of small business sites. If you can afford the $1,000 plus monthly maintenance fees for real search engine positioning, that will give superior results. But for $16.99 per month (that multiplies out to $203.88 a year), I think this will improve traffic significantly. If you're not doing much at all, you'll see a big increase after three or four months. If you're already working hard at marketing your site, you'll see less increase.
The only Web marketing service I can think that compares to Metamend price-wise is Microsoft bCentral's Traffic Builder, which costs $19.99 a month. For that they will submit you to the top 400 search engines (though a dozen search engines account for 90%+ of the traffic, the others a mainly a waste of time), allow you to check your search engine ranking for 10 webpages per month (this is good, but no big deal), give you 5,000 banner ads per month on their LinkExchange network (good, but click-through rates are LOW), allow you to send 5,000 e-mails to customers using their ListBot feature (a good service if you'll use it consistently), and a listing in the MSN Yellow Pages (well, might bring a little traffic). http://premium.bcentral.com/
For the small business person, I think the potential help from Metamend is greater than what you'll get from Traffic Builder. Metamend works consistently to raise your ranking in search engines that can potentially bring you lots of traffic each month. Banner ads on LinkExchange will bring you only about 25 visitors a month (assuming a 0.5% click-through rate). E-mails to customers can be sent using free services such as eGroups.com and Topica.com.
Metamend's huge customer base comes primarily from web hosting services that resell this service to their customers, or include it as part of their service. As I've studied it, I think it is sounds like a very good way to increase your traffic. I especially like Metamend's lack of hype when describing their service and results. In order for Metamend to work automatically, you'll need to give Metamend your website username and password so it can FTP up new pages and download your log pages. But they seem to take security very seriously.
If this sounds like it's something that will help you, try it out, and make sure you give it four to six months in order for some of the slow-indexing search engines to kick in. I think you'll be pleased with significant increases in traffic to your site and will make it part of your regular marketing mix.
