A funny thing happened when we launched the Kikabink Internet Marketing Search Engine yesterday. We suddenly started to think a bit like a search engine! And maybe that’s a good thing…

Basically, when we first thought of offering an Internet marketing search engine, the plan was to assemble 100 or so of the most popular Internet marketing related websites, blogs, forums and social media sites, and use them as the basis for generating search results.

We assessed ‘popularity’ according to several measures, including those used by various social media sites and search engines.

Our thinking was that the highest quality Internet marketing information was sure to come from the most highly regarded sites, blogs, etc on the Internet.

And so, the Kikabink Internet Marketing Search Engine was born with a pool of 125 domains from which search results would be generated.

But we also knew that these initial 125 domains were a STARTING point.

After all, if our search results were solely based on the most popular domains, we might end up excluding results that were MORE relevant, but just happened to come from websites that were brand new.

Since we’re using Google’s algorithm – which already tends to favor older, more established sites – we didn’t want to exacerbate the disadvantage faced by new sites by disallowing them from our Internet marketing search engine.

And that’s why we have a link at the top of the search engine page to invite people to submit new websites. Not just “new” sites, of course, but any sites you believe would improve the results we generate.

But now that we’ve started to receive website submissions, we’ve got to decide which go in and which do not!

Not only is it harder to decide than we first thought, but we’re starting to really understand what search engine companies, such as Google, mean when they talk about striving to deliver RELEVANT results to people.

That, and the challenge of trying to MEASURE the relevance of a website when the search engine doesn’t know exactly what someone means when they type in their search phrase.

For example, I originally thought that our search engine would be based on content rich websites that deliver lots of valuable, free information.

The idea being that if someone like yourself typed in, say, ‘start Internet marketing business’ you would value results that linked to sites containing lots of free information on how to start an Internet marketing business.

If we were to translate your search, and our search results, into the form of a conversation, it might go something like this:

“You’re looking for something? Here it is straight away. No mysteries to unravel, no jumping through hoops, no clicking here, there and everywhere, and no need to do anything (such as buy something) in order to get the information you’re looking for. Here it is for you NOW.”

But… is free information really what you want?

Don’t you want the most relevant, highest quality, best value information that helps you solve a problem or achieve an objective?

Is that always or necessarily free?

And what if someone is wants to buy something? If the Kikabink Internet Marketing Search Engine only includes ‘free’ sites, then how will that serve someone who is specifically looking for a product, service or solution of some kind?

Which all comes back to RELEVANCE doesn’t it? And why relevance is the holy grail of search engines.

And so, while Google does its bit to rank webpages based on their relevance to specific keywords, we will aim to include websites in the search engine that relate to Internet marketing and which, in our opinion, contain quality information of interest to Internet marketers.

‘Quality’ is subjective, of course, but I can say that we’ll be doing our best to keep certain sites OUT of the directory: link-farms, ‘blogs’ that are nothing more than an aggregation of RSS feeds from elsewhere, parked sites that are just a bunch of ads, and other sites that offer unoriginal, redundant content.

Again, it’s not because such sites are, by definition, ‘bad’. We actually have an extensive portfolio of parked websites! It’s simply to strip out, as much as possible, redundant content, and to keep the search results as relevant as we can.

You can probably see why we’re starting to think like a search engines. And, to that end, I’m getting a greater sense of how they view OUR websites.

And YOUR websites too!

It’s all about relevance.

There are plenty of black hat techniques to simulate relevance – in order to ‘trick’ the search engine algorithms. But it seems a sure bet that building and evolving a website based on being relevant to your target audience – even if you do NO deliberate search engine optimization (SEO) – is the way to win the search engines’ favor.

Related Posts

• “Introducing a New Internet Marketing Search Engine…”
• Why ‘Targeting’ Is Critical To On-Page Search Engine Optimization
• Search Engine Optimization – The 4 Critical Factors That Affect Your Ranking
• OneRiot – Impressive Real Time Search Engine
• Why Too Many External Links Can Harm Your Search Engine Ranking

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 3:00 am and is filed under Feature, Internet Marketing Niche, Search Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.